The games bounce plays

While everyone is busy criticising the flat tracks for the Test series between India and Sri Lanka, we should remember that it wasn't all that long ago that Stuart Clark's bowling was making life difficult for batsmen in Champions League matches at the Feroz Shah Kotla. Also, how a second-string West Indies attack gave everyone sleepless nights during Champions Trophy matches at the Wanderers. The two extremes do exist. In my opinion, bounce is the key factor in the quality of a track. It's the bounce that makes stroke-making easy and the lack of it that makes batting predictable.

The low blows
You are more likely to find low-bounce surface in the subcontinent, and perhaps in the West Indies these days. In theory all you need to do on such surfaces is stay on the front foot and play with a straight bat. In practice, though, it is quite difficult to take a long stride forward when the ball is pitched short, especially when the bowler at the other end is a certain Shoaib Akhtar.

I remember watching Shoaib bowl at full throttle on a low Kotla pitch. He was bowling in the high 140s, and getting the ball to reverse-swing too. There are only a few batsmen in the world who can take a long stride forward to a genuinely quick bowler, let alone stretch forward when the ball is pitched short. Fortunately we had one such batsman, Rahul Dravid, facing Shoaib, but even he found the low bounce difficult to negotiate. He went forward on almost every occasion, but still couldn't stop one from breaching his defence.

Similar scenes were repeated in the Champions League matches played in Delhi. Even though the mind tells you to get forward when Brett Lee has bowled short of a good length, the body simply refuses to go forward. It's sort of a reflex action.

Bowlers are smart operators and aren't shy of banging it in short on a regular basis on such surfaces. Since you can never be sure of the bounce, it isn't advisable to duck underneath the ball, but getting on top of every bouncer is not possible either, even when the wicket is keeping low.

In Delhi's concluded Ranji match in Lucknow, a lot of batsmen got hit on the body because of the lack of bounce. Pitching on the exact same length, some deliveries sailed comfortably over the head and some had the batsmen in a tangle. Ideally you should look to play every short-pitched ball, and then either get on top of it or sway away.

A batsman has to keep in mind not to be impulsive. A good puller of the ball, for instance, automatically sets himself up for a pull as soon as the ball is dropped short. Ricky Ponting had first-hand experience of this in a warm-up game in Hyderabad last year. Irfan Pathan kept banging the ball in short, and Ponting kept playing the horizontal shots, and kept turning around to see the ball bounce twice before reaching the wicketkeeper. Every time he did it, I asked him if he was enjoying the bounce.

Later in the match, I too fell victim to the lack of bounce. I went back and across to a Stuart Clark bouncer and expected to play the ball around my ribs, but to my utter disbelief the ball crashed into my shoes. This time it was Ponting ribbing me about the bounce.

On such surfaces the fielders standing in the slips, along with the wicketkeeper, suffer as much as the batsmen. You might have criticised MS Dhoni and Sachin Tendulkar for letting a couple go through between them in the current series, but on pitches with low bounce you hardly get the time to react. The pace at which a bowler bowls isn't reduced, but fielders have to come up a long way to ensure that edges carry to them. While you stand almost at the 30-yard circle in Australia, at times you have to stand at not more than 15 yards away to the same bowler on low tracks. Good fielders keep coming up because it's better to drop a catch on the full - at least you have a chance to catch it - than watch the ball land in front of you.

The high tide
While playing on surfaces with extra bounce, a batsman needs to stay on the back foot and play with the horizontal bat more often. Even though it's tougher to adjust to high bounce than low bounce, it's still manageable.

The problem is when the bounce is not predictable. The West Indies attack posed all kinds of problems to the Australian batting in South Africa during the Champions Trophy. The ball was bouncing alarmingly from a good length to hit Ponting and friends on the hands or other parts of their bodies.

All you can do on such surfaces is to have decisive footwork, which Ponting did have on that day, and try to get to the pitch of the ball whenever it's pitched up and use the depth of the crease to go fully back when pitched short.

On such surfaces balls pitched fuller cause problems, because there's very little time to adjust to the uneven bounce. Hence bowlers try to keep it up to the bat as much as possible. The batsman needs to counterattack to force a bowler to change his length. That's the reason one goes hard at balls that are pitched up, hoping that the bowler starts bowling short to cut down on the runs conceded. So it isn't always right to criticise a batsman for playing what seems like a reckless shot, because it may just be an attempt to survive.

While most batsmen will not believe or accept it, there are times when one gets scared of uneven bounce. I have seen batsmen, especially in the lower order, back away towards square leg, and you can't blame them. The match I'm referring to here is a Ranji Trophy game played on an underprepared green top at the Kotla between Delhi and Orissa. Balls pitched just short of a good length were frequently sailing over the batsman's and wicketkeeper's heads. You not only need a lot of courage but also a large share of luck to survive on such surfaces.

While batting on surfaces with low bounce isn't dangerous, it makes for boring cricket beyond a point. On the contrary, it's quite entertaining to see batsmen hopping and jumping while batting on surfaces with uneven bounce on the higher side. But how can one not feel for the batsmen?