The pitch boomerang: how India's rank turners are biting them, not the opposition
In recent years India have been rolling out Test pitches with high turn, but rather than boosting the home side, they have brought the opposition into the game
Himanish Ganjoo15-Jan-2025After making the final of the World Test Championship for two consecutive cycles, India have failed to qualify for this year’s match. While they were blanked 1-3 in Australia, it was the shock whitewash by New Zealand at home that really went against expectations and deflated their chances of making the WTC final. The last two losses of that series came on spinning pitches, where Mitchell Santner and Ajaz Patel ran riot. With India’s insistence on turning, difficult surfaces, this kind of upending was always lurking around the corner.The second half of this millennium has seen a significantly higher percentage of outright results in Test cricket compared to the first half. The rarity of draws in the past decade or so has been attributed to stronger bowling attacks and tougher pitches on which teams have had to chase results in the quest for WTC points. This shift in pitches has directly reduced the average runs per wicket. The drop is drastic after 2016, first due to the colloquially dubbed “pace pandemic” of spicy, fast-bowling-friendly conditions across the world, and after 2019 due to teams creating bowler-friendly surfaces to chase outright wins. From 2000 to 2015, the cost of a wicket was 34.1 runs, which has fallen to 30.16 since then.The arrow plot above shows country-wise batting averages since 2014, broken down into the pre-WTC and WTC eras. The averages versus pace have gone down in the WTC era in almost all countries. Averages against spin, on the other hand, have gone down in fewer countries. The change is most drastic in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, but the WTC-era figure is the lowest in India, by far. India have doubled down on spinning surfaces in the hunt for results, and perhaps to take the toss out of the equation.
A knock-on effect of this strategy of spinning surfaces has been a fall in the averages of Indian batters against spin. Away from India, Indian batters averaged 40.7 against spinners in the 2014-2018 period, which has gone up to 45.5 after that. At home, this number has dropped from 45.6 to 39.3 between the two eras. Even so, as the overall average facing spinners in India has been 28 in the WTC era, India are faring significantly better than visiting teams at batting against spin. It reflects in their outstanding home record before the 0-3 loss to New Zealand.The Indian team has happily – and mostly successfully – sacrificed personal batting goals for better chances at winning. However, their tough home conditions have also brought losses more frequently compared to the phase from 2012 to 2020. From 2012 onwards, India outmatched their opponents on slow surfaces with consistent turn, banking on the sheer quality of their bowlers to eke out wickets in conditions that were nowhere close to extreme. Bereft of spinners of the same quality, visiting teams could not generate enough wicket-taking deliveries or even exert enough control to tie India down. After the pandemic, spin-friendly pitches have brought opposition spinners into play. Visiting sides have also come better prepared, with their bowlers better poised to exploit conditions in India.Related
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The plot below shows the batting average and average turn in each Test series in India since 2016, for deliveries by spinners only, in cases where tracking data is available.After the Border-Gavaskar Trophy in 2017, perhaps as a reaction to the loss in Pune, India started making pitches with less turn compared to the ones they had been playing on since 2016. The overall batting averages facing spin went up in step with this drop in turn. Starting 2021, though, there is a clear trend with higher mean turn and much lower batting averages.
In all the series above, only three times has the visiting side averaged more than 0.75 times the Indian side against spin. Two of those series were against Australia. The third was the recently concluded one versus New Zealand, which was also the only instance in the last 12 years in which India averaged less versus spin than their opponents. A variety of factors have resulted in these three instances, which we will explore shortly.The threat of a delivery comes from an intricate combination of characteristics, of both bowler and pitch. The amount of turn is only one aspect of how dangerous a ball is, albeit an important one.The bar graph below shows the batting average against the degree of turn, considering all deliveries for which ball-tracking data is available in Tests in India since 2016. The existence of four regimes of turn is apparent from the data. Less than 0.5 degrees of turn is a “straight” ball with no threat; 0.5 to 2.5 degrees is the proverbial one that “doesn’t turn”, beating the batter who is playing for turn. From 2.5 to 5 degrees, the turn is “usual” – this is the average delivery a batter has been trained on and can navigate without issue. The real danger lies in balls spinning more than 5 degrees. It’s clear that deviation from “usualness”, in either direction, causes issues.
From this point on, this article will use tracking data from 2016 to 2024, a period for which we have almost complete coverage for Tests in India. As the data for the average turn above shows, 2020 was an inflection point for the general nature of pitches in India, so we can divide the period of interest into two four-year segments: 2016-2019 and 2021-2024.Results against spin depend on both speed and turn: higher turn at a higher speed is more difficult to counter. Comparing the two eras reveals that the batting averages of visiting sides in India against good-length bowling have mostly gone down in recent years – for almost all speed and turn ranges.
The pattern of dropping averages holds for Indian batters too. However, the drop for low-turn balls (that turn between 0.5 and 2.5 degrees) has been drastic, especially for the high-speed range. This makes sense in light of the more extreme turn generated on the post-pandemic Indian surfaces. The expectation of greater turn changes the batters’ internal calibration when facing spin. In such conditions, the one that does not turn becomes as dangerous as the one that does.
The data alludes to this. From 2016 to 2019, Indian batters averaged 41.2 against low-turn balls on a good length on low-turn pitches (matches that had less than 3.6 degrees of turn) and 65.0 against the same kind of delivery on high-turn pitches (those offering more than 3.6 degrees of average turn). From 2021 onwards, they average 27.4 against such balls on low-turn pitches and a measly 14.5 on high-turn surfaces. It is possible that the general expectation of high turn makes batters change their methods to counter spin, making straighter ones more dangerous on turning pitches in a high-turn era. Former India batting coach Vikram Rathour explains this: “On turning pitches, it becomes more tricky. You’re expecting it to turn every time, so you are looking to cover the turn, and that is where the straighter balls are picking up more wickets. It does become more difficult to play.”Two other noteworthy trends emerge from an analysis of the pitches in the WTC era in India. First, the average speed for spin has been increasing. This is true for both visiting spinners and the Indian pair of R Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja. On more abrasive pitches, spinners can generate enough turn even when bowling quicker. In conjunction, “quick” turn restricts the batter’s reaction time, creating more jeopardy. Bowlers across the spectrum seem to have realised this, which has made batting all the more difficult. As the comparative plot below shows, the distribution of speeds has shifted significantly higher in the last four years compared to pre-2020.
The other factor, often hard to perceive, is the anomalous bounce on WTC-era Indian pitches. There exists a Goldilocks zone for bounce, in which it is comfortable to play, where the ball loses 30 to 50% of vertical speed when it bounces. Any balls outside this range of speed-loss bounce too high or too low, making them difficult to face. Tracking data shows us that the proportion of such anomalous-bounce deliveries is noticeably higher in the last five years in India. Coupled with the high turn after 2020, this makes facing spinners even tougher.
India have gunned for difficult pitches since the onset of the WTC, but the data is clear that such conditions reduce their relative advantage and bridge the gap between visiting and home spinners. From 2016 to 2019, visiting spinners managed to get only 7% balls to turn more than 5 degrees at speeds higher than 85kph. After 2020, that figure has gone up to 14%. For Indian spinners, the corresponding numbers are 9% and 14%. Visiting spinners now have about the same chance of bowling a highly threatening delivery as their Indian counterparts.Although it is hard to determine exactly what combination of characteristics of a delivery leads to a wicket-taking threat, good length and high turn are the best determinants of a dangerous ball. The above trends show that the new Indian pitches give opposition bowlers a better chance of higher turn, spinners are bowling faster, and there is significant anomalous bounce on offer. More turn also correlates with more loss of pace from the pitch, inducing mistimed strokes.
The table above shows some statistics for visiting spinners in India by series, shedding light on what it takes to run India close in India. The three series in which India have been challenged during their 12-year dominance at home have all seen visiting spinners average less than 30 runs per wicket. In 2017 and 2023, Australia managed the best good-length percentages on this table. In 2017, they got 24% of anomalous bounce deliveries and 39% turning more than 5 degrees. In 2023, they get 24% balls bouncing abnormally and 25% high-turning balls. In addition, they also got 64% and 58% of their spin deliveries close to the stumps, creating the perfect storm, which brought them close to beating India at home.In the Mumbai Test of 2024, India were undone by Ajaz Patel, who found the right lengths on a helpful surface. Although only 66% of his deliveries were on a good length, and he threatened the stumps only 48% of the time, he got a massive 57% balls to turn more than 5 degrees and 32% of them to bounce outside the normal range. That much uncertainty was enough to get him a match-winning performance despite not being the most accurate. In Pune, Mitchell Santner zeroed in perfectly on the speeds required to generate turn on a “slow turner”. He was consistently slower than the two Indian spinners, and 39% of his deliveries were high-turn balls. In comparison, Ashwin and Jadeja bowled just 19% and 23% of such balls, since they were bowling much faster on the whole. The Indian spinners were more accurate in both these games on aggregate, but the New Zealand spinners generated much more deviation aided by the surfaces.In both these Tests, New Zealand also got the fortune of winning the toss and the best of the bowling conditions. In Bengaluru, India got caught on a first-day pitch that was almost as bouncy as the first day of the recent Perth Test, coupled with high seam and swing and found it impossible to recover from one bad innings. There has been an understandable outcry at India being whitewashed at home, but this series loss was the culmination of bursts of amazing performances by the visitors, all coming on back-to-back devilish pitches. India’s much-vaunted spin duo was aging, and missed their lines and lengths at different points in this series. A host of extreme factors had to coincide for this loss to come by, and the resulting discourse needs to factor that in. The New Zealand bowlers put in three amazing performances on helpful wickets, using a varied set of conditions much better than their Indian counterparts, but the series loss has evoked emphatic pronouncements of the decline of this great Indian side, which might be a tad extreme given the state of the surfaces they have played on.From 2016 to 2019, India perfected a winning template at home. Their spinners were accurate enough to overcome the relatively placid, true pitches, while their batters could feast on the comparatively inaccurate spin bowled by their opponents. The recent move to produce surfaces with inconsistent bounce and more turn has made their batters unsure against the straighter ones and brought visiting spinners much closer to theirs in terms of wicket-taking threat. They reverted to easier pitches in the 2024 series against England – which had anomalous bounce but not extreme turn – and comfortably outplayed them.It is tempting to ascribe India’s fortunes to a decline in batting techniques, but India’s recent home pitches are too tough for most batters to contend with – a good-length ball at 90kph turning 5 degrees challenges the edges of human ability. The gap between the averages of the Indian and touring batters shrinks significantly as the pitches progress to generating more turn. Perhaps a return to calmer conditions will be the best for India’s quest for World Test Championship points.