With the fourth consecutive day of the Test match also getting called off without so much as a toss between the two teams, this Test match has turned out to be nothing short of a fiasco. Afghanistan do not have much experience playing in whites. This Test match would have been the 10th long-format game they played but it was not to be. The first day featured no play thanks to relentless rainfall in the Indian city. On the second day, although there was not any rain during the game hours, heavy rain the previous night flooded the ground enough to make the conditions unfit for play. The surface is also made of black soil, making it difficult to soak up the water. Persistent rain on the third day had the same in store for both teams. Finally, the penultimate day too was called off after the rainfall decided not to subside.
Its frustrating, more so when you realize that your team does not get to play this format as much. And the same frustration was reflected in the remarks that the Afghanistan Cricket Board (ACB) gave about the conditions and mismanagement in Greater Noida. An ACB official was quoted as saying,
“You won’t believe me but the stadia in Afghanistan have better facilities than this one. We have improved our infrastructure in the past few years. Our first choice was the Lucknow stadium and the second was Dehradun. Our requests were rejected by the BCCI and we were told that both the states are hosting their respective T20 leagues. This was the only ground available and we had no other choice left,”
However, the Board was quick to row back on its statement by officially stating that the choice to play in Greater Noida was made by the ACB itself. International Cricket Manager of the ACB, Minhajuddin Naz said in a press release,
“We chose Greater Noida as it was most convenient in terms of logistics. It was closer to Delhi and also connectivity from Kabul was better. Everyone, including the ground authorities, has worked hard. Even if it had been any other venue, they would have struggled to get it back on time.”
Even without the blame game, the circumstance is sour enough to raise questions on a lot of things. The first of which is, will the International Cricket Council (ICC) revoke the hosting rights of the Indian city? It must be noted here that like many other firsts of this Test match, this was also Vijay Singh Pathik Stadium’s first time playing host to a Test match. In all fairness, though, the statement by the ACB manager has some truth to it. In the game we all love, rain has always been the biggest antagonist. Yes, it’s less frequent for complete Test matches to be washed out like this, as only seven matches have been abandoned without a single ball bowled since the inception of cricket. This does not change the fact that whenever such a situation arises, cricket will have to succumb.
While a lot could have been done to avoid this literal and figurative quagmire. For instance, shifting the game somewhere else. But all of this could have only been done before the teams made their first walk to the ground on the opening day. All Afghanistan can do now is await another chance to put up a show in the whites, as the fifth day is likely getting washed out in a similar way.
