The fast bowler's snarl ft. Mohammed Shami and Umesh Yadav

[Torrent Disney]

Below the West Stand of the MCA Stadium in Pune are two cavernous rooms accessed via the same staircase. One is the press-conference room. To get there, you have to pass the other room, which is usually locked shut. You can't see what's inside, but you can smell it. Dogs. Some twenty guard dogs, employed by the Maharashtra Cricket Association to assist the stadium security staff.

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Test cricket is supposed to feel, and perhaps even smell, like 11 Rottweilers tearing into a piece of steak sitting four feet from the stumps. At its fiercest, this intensity should communicate itself to the spectators.

For the best part of the first two days of the Pune Test, the cricket didn't feel like that. And then, an hour from stumps on day two, someone went and let the guard dogs out.

"Look, if I could speak on the pitch itself, it was quite similar to what you would get back home in South Africa. I honestly felt that it was quite suited to our strength as a bowling unit"Temba Bavuma

This was a pitch with a healthy tinge of green in it. For the first time since the Kolkata Test of 2017, India were playing three fast bowlers. The pitch for that Test was made to order, to help India prepare for the tours of South Africa, England and Australia that lay ahead. India probably didn't request this one in Pune - they surely weren't going to try that when the series was still alive, and not against South Africa's fast bowlers. In any case, it wasn't a green top in quite the same way. It was far better to bat on, and in his pitch report, Sunil Gavaskar suggested the grass was only there to help bind the soil and prevent it from breaking up too early.

South Africa's quicks had first use of the pitch, and though there was enough seam and bounce to keep them interested for at least the first half of the first day, they didn't worry the batsmen unduly. Vernon Philander, Kagiso Rabada and Anrich Nortje ended up with combined figures of 81-14-259-3 as India ran away to 601 for 5 declared.