Pakistan and Bangladesh are battling it out in the Rawalpindi Cricket Stadium. Both teams have pace-heavy attacks featuring for them. If you started watching cricket in 2022, you would have counted both teams as nuts. Who plays fast bowlers on belter pitches that offer no assistance to them whatsoever? Its really kamikazeing their careers. But here’s a little spoiler for you. Cricket has been around for centuries before 2022 and you happened to see the Rawalpindi pitch in its most un-Pindi version.
Rawalpindi notoriously became known for its flat wicket during England’s tour of Pakistan in 2022. Playing in Pakistan after 17 years, England hoped for anything but a pitch so generously flat that it basically chewed runs. England reached a hundred runs during the first hour of the Test match and ended the day with 506 runs. By the end of the Test match, both teams had collectively scored a little less than 1800 runs over the course of five days, with little to no deterioration in the surface. Anyone who watched that match started using Pindi’s pitch as a synonym for flat decks. Even then-Pakistan Cricket Board Chairman, Ramiz Raja termed the pitch ‘embarrassing’.
It was not just England’s tour that saw a lifeless pitch in Rawalpindi. During the Benaud-Qadir Trophy earlier the same year, the disparity between assistance to batters and bowlers was clear. Both Pakistan and Australia scored nearly 1187 during the match, earning the venue its first of the two below-par ratings it received in a year.
But the opening Test match between Pakistan and Bangladesh saw the same pitch behaving very differently. Bangladesh chose to ball first and found early success. The pitch assisted the pacers initially and was hell-bent on making life difficult for the batters. As the ball aged, the pitch allowed some respite to the batters. By the end of the first day, the deck had provided equal opportunities for both teams to keep getting at each other.
So what really is the nature of Pindi’s pitch? The answer to that is; nearly similar to how it played during the first day of the ingoing Pakistan vs Bangladesh Test. The surface historically favors the pacers, with the green devils appearing and disappearing from time to time. During the drier part of summer, it offers a slowish turn to the tweakers as well. Lastly, the batters start taking control midway through the match.
Since cricket’s return to Pakistan, the venue has hosted five completed Test matches. Besides England and Australia, the men in green have played South Africa, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh here. In all three of these Test matches, no unreal amount of runs amassing was witnessed. The average first innings score that Pindi offered during these games was 271. As much as it sounds exciting, not a lot of fans would prefer watching heaps of runs being scored in a Test match. Five days of relentless run flow is no one’s idea of a time spent well. It’s pleasing to see that the pitch has been restored to its original form which has historically offered equal contest between bat and ball.
