There is no such thing as a neutral pitch, so stop pretending

Complaints about doctored surfaces ignore that the soil under a ground is a local geological fact, not a conspiracy against the tourists.

A Test finishes inside three days on a turning surface and the visiting press writes the word doctored. The same visitors host a series on a green seamer where nobody passes two hundred and it gets described as a proper cricket wicket. This has been going on for so long that the double standard is almost invisible to the people repeating it.

Underneath the argument is a physical fact that hardly ever gets explained. Pitch behaviour is dominated by the clay content of the soil the square is built from, and that soil is generally dug locally because carting thousands of tonnes across a country is expensive. Clay is what holds a surface together when it dries. High clay content means the top binds, cracks open in large slabs rather than dusting away, and the bounce stays true for longer. Lower clay content with more silt or sand means the surface loses cohesion as it dries, the top layer breaks into fine particles, and the ball starts gripping and deviating on days three and four.

That is why some grounds have produced the same character of pitch for a century regardless of who prepared them. It is a property of the ground, not a decision made on Tuesday. Curators can push a surface a good way in either direction with watering, rolling and grass cover, but they are working within a range set by geology.

What follows from this, and what I will happily argue with anyone, is that home advantage through conditions is legitimate and central to the sport rather than a corruption of it. Cricket is the only major game whose playing surface is a living, local, weather-dependent object. Removing that variation to make results comparable would strip out the thing that makes touring hard and makes an away series win meaningful.

The genuinely reasonable complaint is not about spin or seam. It is about safety and about matches that end before the fourth morning, because a two-day Test is a commercial disaster and an uneven bouncing surface is dangerous. Those are the standards worth policing.

Judge a pitch on whether it was dangerous and whether it gave both disciplines something.

Do not judge it on whether it suited the guests.