On a day when the drop-in pitches for the Twenty20 World Cup came in for all-round criticism, Rahul Dravid took dig at the practice facilities provided for the global championship. “It’s a bit strange to be practicing in a park,” the India coach remarked. Teams playing in New York have had to train at Cantiague Park, about five miles away from the ground, a situation that clearly did not amuse Dravid.
“Obviously at the World Cups you’d be in big stadiums or you’d be at cricket stadiums traditionally. But you know, we’re at a public park and practicing,” Dravid, who has played in three World Cups and coached the India side in the last three ICC events, said flashing a smile that smacked more of sarcasm rather than amusement.
Suddenly, the facilities in New York which will host eight of the 16 World Cup games allotted to the US, have come into focus. The International Cricket Council (ICC) built a temporary stadium and on Monday Sri Lanka got bundled out for 77 against South Africa, who also struggled before knocking off the target.
Damian Hough, who was in-charge of the drop-in pitches, had predicted the pitches to be like any other Twenty20 surface. “We are excited to see the arrival of the pitches here in New York. We’re now focused on bedding in the pitches here in New York to ensure we’re delivering an end product of the highest quality,” Hough, who is also the head curator of Adelaide Oval, said in a statement released through the ICC last month.
The pitch received widespread disapproval, with Sanjay Manjrekar posting a comment on social media that seemed to capture the general sentiment. “Pitch of the 80s & batters of the 2020s. Not a good union,” Manjrekar wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Dravid, meanwhile, did not miss the absence of buzz around New York, where India will play three games, and hoped the situation will improve once the games start. “Yeah, obviously it’s slightly different. It’s obviously exciting that it’s coming to a new country, it’s coming to a new place. (It) feels slightly different in terms of, I guess, typically the buzz that you have around these events, with cricket not being one of the major sports in this country. So you don’t feel that kind of buzz over here. But hopefully once our games start and a lot of the Indian fans do start coming in, you start seeing that similar kind of excitement.
“So things are certainly different from that perspective. But yeah, I think from a preparation perspective and from what we want to get out of it, I don’t think that’s changed, our preparation, our professionalism, the way we are trying to approach things. It’s pretty, pretty similar to what we would normally do.”
