Indian bowling coach Paras Mhambrey said on Saturday that the Ranchi pitch has behaved contrary to the team’s expectations after the home side stuttered to 219 for seven in response to England’s first-innings total of 353 in the fourth Test between the two sides.
“From what we have seen out here, generally, the nature of the pitch is that it gets slower as the game progresses. We expected that. But, to be honest, we didn’t expect it to play that low on the second day itself,” said Mhambrey after Stumps on Day 2.
“A couple of balls did keep low in the first innings itself. We expected it to get slower. But we were not expecting the variable bounce.”
He also stepped away from terming the pitch a rank turner, adding that the team management never asked for such a surface.
“Firstly, the venue is not something that we can control. The way the [Ranchi] pitch plays has always been similar here. It has never been a rank-turner and I would not call this one.
“There was variable bounce. But I don’t think there were too many that spun sharply from the wicket. It was the variable bounce, on the lower side, which has made batting difficult. That is the nature of the soil. There were no specific instructions from us [to the curator] that we wanted to play on a rank turner,” he added.
