Former Australian cricketer Tom Moody has given a huge thumbs down to the pitch at Trinidad’s Brian Lara Cricket Stadium used for the first semi-final of the 2024 ICC Men’s T20 World Cup between South Africa and Afghanistan , saying the surface was not suitable for hosting any cricket matches. The pitch offered enormous lateral movement for fast bowlers and also offered excessive and inconsistent bounce as some balls flew off the surface while others remained quite low. Amid challenging conditions, South Africa did their best to bowl out Afghanistan for just 56 and chased down the total in 8.5 overs to book their place in the final in Barbados on Sunday.
“I don’t think you’d want to see that in any game, to be honest. You want a fair contest between bat and ball and I’m not advocating that we need surfaces that need 200 runs. But you need a consistent jump, that’s the most important thing. Any batsman would throw up his hands and say: this is the most important thing.
“If you have a ball that is hitting the tip of the bat or one that you feel like you are going to hit with your gloves at the same length, that is a very difficult challenge to combat. If you have lateral movement or swing or spin, that’s a different challenge, but at least there’s some kind of consistency and you can come up with some kind of strategy and method to combat that and I don’t think that’s been good enough.”
“I actually covered two games in Trinidad at the Brian Lara Cricket Academy and the surface was very similar. You see this kind of crazy paving, if I may say so, where a lot of dense grass was built up around those cracks and you could say that’s what promoted the inconsistency of the jump. So it will be something that they reflect on, if not already reflect on and think, well, we got it wrong,” Moody said on ESPNCricinfo’s TimeOut program.
Similar views were echoed by former Zimbabwe batsman Andy Flower. “You saw some interesting visual images from above the square and some commentators mentioned that this was a brand new pitch and perhaps they could have used a pitch that had been used previously and therefore you knew you could use a certain type of bounce. .”
“That’s certainly something more consistent and predictable, but those photos showed that crazy paving effect and that those blocks and the cracks around them produced this wild variation in bounce. And as a batsman, you’re trying to predict where the ball will be. You want to find it somewhere around the middle of the bat at least.”
“And in this field, it was almost impossible to do that consistently. I thought it was actually a little dangerous. Some balls flew around the shoulder, neck and chin height of the quick South Africans and one of them flew over Quinton de Kock, the goalkeeper’s head and gloves for four byes, and I was pleased that no one was hurt.”
Flower also felt that the pitch in Trinidad reminded them of how difficult the pitches were during the New York leg of the competition, where South Africa won three matches.
“We saw a similar field in New York at the start of the competition, which was not good enough for international quality rapids. And then we saw it again today and it produced a complete mismatch.”
“And you can’t blame Afghanistan for doing what it did immediately. They had an excellent record of batting first and defense second with a very good and varied attack of their own. But the taco first was a very difficult question. You didn’t know what a good score would be and they were amazed.”
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