Finally, Motera gets its head above water

It's a minor miracle that, come tomorrow, there will be a Test match played at Motera. A three-hour cloudburst on the night of August 8 brought 16 inches of rain leaving the ground submerged under seven feet of water. The pitch soil had been just changed in June and, to add to the problem, the curator Dhiraj Parsana was on vacation in the USA.

"It apparently was like a lake, you know," Parsana said on Wednesday. "The water came from the nearby river [the Sabarmati] and the whole ground was submerged. They tried everything, including firefighters , but the water stayed there for three days. There was just too much water to handle. Eventually they managed to find the block in the drainage and the water began flowing out."

It took 30 people, led by the man everyone, Parsana included, calls "Kalubhai", two days to clear the debris and get the ground dry.

"When I came in on August 23 it looked alright," Parsana said. "Kalubhai and his men had done a superb job. It also helped that it didn't rain after that night and the sun was out." The next stage was aeration. Parsana and his men sunk hollow tines (cylinders) all along the ground - "You can still see the holes out there" - in a process that allows air into the soil and so helps it dry out faster. "We found dampness but no damage. Later we had the supersopper machine running every morning; all the fungus was removed."

The soil began to breathe and the ground returned to its old lustre. A couple of club games were played, involving the likes of Gujarat fast bowlers Sidharth Trivedi and Ashraf Makda, and Parsana was satisfied with the bounce and carry.

Back to here and now and this is where you get that lovely cliché: "Sporting wicket". How would the pitch play? "It will help seamers on the first day," Parsana said. "It will take spin early. It will help batsmen on day two and day three. It can help reverse-swing but that will depend on the bowler's skill. It will be a sporting track." So it will seam, spin, reverse and be batsmen-friendly. It explains the last two Tests played here: India were shot out for 76 in the first and Sri Lanka piled up 760 in the second. At Motera, when it rains, it pours.