Pakistan vs Australia: Stuart Clark rates Dubai pitch 'poor' for Test cricket

Pakistan and Australia are currently fighting it out in the first of the two-match Test series in Dubai. The hosts have managed to post 482 runs on the board thanks to stunning centuries from Mohammad Hafeez and Haris Sohail while the Australians have also started exceptionally well with their openers posting 142 runs for the first wicket. Meanwhile, the former Aussie cricketer Stuart Clark has lambasted the pitch offered for the series opener and has rated it as poor.

He claimed that there is nothing in the pitch for the bowlers and lauded his team for being disciplined throughout the 165 overs they bowled. Even Tom Moody had criticised the wicket and said that such pitches make Test cricket boring. However, the ball is turning more as the match is progressing though it has hardly troubled the visiting batsmen so far who are enjoying their stay in the middle.

It is very flat

Stuart Clark, while speaking to Fox Sports, opined that the Australian bowlers tried their best but it is very hard to get wickets when the pitch is offering nothing. He also felt that the visitors didn’t have much luck with them on the opening day when Hafeez and Imam-ul-Haq stitched more than 200 runs for the first wicket.

“It’s a pretty poor wicket. The wicket’s obviously very, very flat and very hard to get guys out. But the Australians tried hard, they toiled hard and they did pretty much all they could. They didn’t have much luck, but it was really hard to do anything given that there was just nothing in the wicket,” Clark said.

However, he also added that the match will speed up with the pitch degrading fast and felt that the batting will become even harder. “Obviously this game will speed up as the wicket begins to deteriorate over the next couple of days, and it becomes harder to bat on because of variable bounce and it’s spinning a bit more, but it’s not great watching it unfortunately,” Stuart reckoned.

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