Ramiz Raja has blasted the curators of Rawalpindi calling the pitch ‘embarrassing‘. Raja said that it would at least take another season to improve the quality of the pitches in the country. He further said that such pitches are not good for test cricket.
On the opening day of the test match, England scored 500 runs in 75 overs. The pitch did not offer any lateral movement or any spin. The wicket was slow and the ball kept low. None of the edges carried to the Wicket Keeper.
Ramiz Raja said
“It is embarrassing for us, especially when you have a cricketer as chairman,”
Ramiz said, speaking to the media during the lunch break on the second day of the Test.
“This is not a good advert for cricket. We’re a better cricketing nation than this.”
“Ultimately, the only situation is a drop-in pitch. Which is extremely expensive if we’re bringing it from abroad. Instead, we’re developing soil here for drop-in pitches. That way, we can prepare square turners or bouncy wickets depending on what we want.“
“This is not an issue of not leaving grass on the pitch. The grass looks good from the point of view of optics. We need to create bounce, which can happen without grass, as happens on Australian pitches. They don’t leave lots of grass on the pitch. We get different pitches in Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth.“
“We have the same pitches because we get the same kind of soil. We’ve tried to bring a curator from abroad; we needed to bring a curator from Australia for the Lahore Test because the situation had gotten out of hand. When I want a spinning pitch, we don’t get that either, so it ends up being half and half. We don’t want that.”
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