Australia vs India: We won't do anything differently, says Adelaide curator on pitch preparation

The last time India and Australia played a game in Adelaide, the cricketing world witnessed few mind-boggling and scintillating performances. Two best batters from each team Steve Smith and Virat Kohli tried to out-bat each other and in a bid to do so, they provided some stupendous entertainment. The first Test of the upcoming series will commence at the same venue in a few days.

The Adelaide Oval has pretty short square boundaries and to clear the straight boundaries asks a lot from the batsmen. The spinners historically have got some purchase and with quality spinners like Nathan Lyon, Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja on either side, it will be interesting to see what they can extract from this track.

Talking about the current pitch condition, curator Damien Hough talked at length on how they try to maintain an even balance between bat and ball as quoted by Weekend Australia. He also said that the preparation of pitch is pretty similar for red-ball or pink-ball cricket from the Sheffield Shield to International level. He also hinted that they might leave some grass on the pitch.

“We won’t do anything differently. The preparation will be the same. The only difference is we get the covers off earlier and we start earlier. We do the same preparation for red-ball cricket and pink-ball cricket at Shield level. The best way to get an even contest is to leave some grass on there and get that balance between bat and ball. Right now, we really feel that this is where it’s at for the pitch,” Hough was quoted as saying by TimesNow.

Do or die game for Rahul and Vijay

As exciting and promising this encounter is for the world, for a couple of individuals, this is also a serious test of character and fortitude. Murali Vijay and KL Rahul are on the edge of the knife and a good performance in the next two games is pretty imperative for them with youngsters like Prithvi Shaw and Mayank Agarwal upping the ante.

One positive sign for both of them is that they got some quality batting time in the second innings of the warm-up game between India A and Cricket Australia XI. Rahul scored a valiant 62 before being dismissed on a full-toss while Vijay found himself in T20 mode in the second half of his 129-run knock.

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