A Field Guide to Pitch Types

Watch enough cricket and you'll hear a pitch described a dozen ways — a green top, a featherbed, a road, a Bunsen, a minefield, a sticky dog. It can sound like a secret language. It isn't. Each of those names is just shorthand for how a pitch will play, and now that we know what a pitch is made of and how it is prepared, we can decode the lot.

It helps to picture two dials. One runs from pitches that help the fast bowlers to pitches that help the spinners. The other runs from true surfaces — where the ball behaves and the batter can trust the bounce — to treacherous ones, where it doesn't. Every named pitch is just a point somewhere on those two dials. And, as we'll see at the end, a single pitch can slide across them as it ages over five days.

The green top#

A green top is the easiest to spot: a pitch left with a thick, often damp coat of live grass, green rather than the usual straw-brown. The grass and the early-morning moisture make the ball dart sideways off the pitch when it lands — that's seam movement — and on a grey, humid day it will swing through the air too. This is a fast bowler's pitch, at its most dangerous in the first hour with a new ball: the batter has to leave what he can and play late, because the edges fly to the slips. But the bounce is honest, so it is testing rather than unfair — and as the grass browns and the moisture burns off through the first day, batting gets easier. You'll find green tops in England, New Zealand and South Africa, where the cool, damp climate keeps the grass lush.

The featherbed, the road, the belter#

The featherbed — also called a road, a belter, or a flat track — is the opposite, and a batter's dream. It is a hard, flat, true surface with little grass, where the ball comes onto the bat at a friendly, predictable height and the runs flow freely. There's a shade of difference in the slang: a featherbed is soft and slow, the ball sitting up to be hit, while a road is hard and fast-scoring, like a runway. Either way the bowlers toil for nothing, scores climb into the hundreds, and — because nothing seams, swings or turns — the match tends to drift toward a draw. Antigua, in the West Indies, is the textbook home of the featherbed.

The turner — the "Bunsen"#

The turner is the spinner's banquet: a dry, dusty, crumbling surface where the ball grips and deviates sharply off the pitch. Commentators call a big one a "Bunsen" — Cockney rhyming slang, from "Bunsen burner" for "turner". The grip comes from dryness and a broken-up surface: bake the clay hard, shave the grass off, and it cracks and powders, and (as we saw) a pitch built on red, crumbly soil gets there sooner than one on black. On a true turner the bounce stays even and it's a fair, absorbing contest — bat with soft hands, use the crease, sweep. When the turn arrives with uneven bounce, it tips into something nastier. The subcontinent is turner country: Galle in Sri Lanka, and Chennai and Ahmedabad in India, are the classics.

The result pitch#

The result pitch is the turner's purposeful cousin. Left flat and true, a pitch dies into a bore draw — so a curator can do the reverse: leave less water and less grass, bake it, and let it break up fast, to guarantee a finish. Such a pitch gives the seamers something early and the spinners plenty late, so twenty wickets are always there to be taken. The catch is that batting last on the worn surface is misery, which is why the side batting first fights so hard for a big first-innings lead. It is also where the arguments begin: a deliberately deteriorating pitch is praised as "sporting" or damned as "doctored" depending on who is losing — a fight we'll come back to.

The minefield#

The minefield is the dangerous end of the scale, and the one type that is genuinely unfair. Here the bounce is unpredictable: one ball leaps at the throat, the next scuttles along the ankles. It comes from an uneven surface — grass rooted deep in one patch and sparse the next, so the pitch dries and hardens unevenly, or an old, broken surface laced with cracks that the ball can hit and either fly or stay low off. A milder, everyday version is the "two-paced" pitch, a Test surface breaking up by the fourth day. On a true minefield batting is survival, not strokeplay — wickets fall to the pitch itself as much as to the bowler.

The sticky wicket#

The sticky wicket — the "sticky dog" — is the stuff of legend, and now extinct. For most of cricket's history, pitches were left open to the weather. When rain soaked an uncovered pitch and a hot sun then baked the top, the surface turned to glue, and the ball reared, spat and turned almost at random. Batting on a drying sticky was close to impossible, and it produced some of the strangest cricket ever played.

At Melbourne in 1936-37, Don Bradman — his side caught on a sticky — simply reversed Australia's batting order to keep his best players off it until it eased, walking in himself at number seven, making 270, and winning by 365. At Brisbane in 1950-51 a sticky was so vicious that both captains declared their own innings just to get the other side batting on it: twenty wickets fell for barely a hundred runs. The sticky died slowly as grounds began covering their pitches against rain — Australia from the 1920s, England only by the early 1980s — and a true sticky wicket has not been seen in Test cricket since.

The drop-in#

The drop-in is not so much a way a pitch plays as a way it is made — but it earns a place here because it tends to play a certain way. A drop-in pitch is grown off-site, in a giant tray, and craned into the ground a few days before a match (then lifted out afterwards), so the stadium can host football or concerts the rest of the year. The idea was a 1970s invention of the Perth curator John Maley, for Kerry Packer's breakaway World Series Cricket, which had been locked out of the traditional grounds. Today they're used at the MCG and Adelaide Oval in Australia, and Eden Park in New Zealand. Because a tray-grown strip never settles into the natural balance of soil, grass and local climate that an in-ground pitch has, drop-ins tend to play truer and a touch tamer — good for batting, rarely as wild as the real Perth.

It's one pitch, really#

Here is the trick that ties the field guide together: these are not separate species. They are points on those two dials, and a single Test pitch can travel across them as it ages. A green top on the first morning becomes a true belter for batting on days two and three, then a crumbling turner by days four and five. The "type" of a pitch is partly just which day you happen to be looking at it.

Which leaves the biggest question of all. Why does England, almost every time, serve up green seamers, and India dust bowls, and the West Indies featherbeds? Why does each country have a pitch personality of its own? That is a story of soil, sky and cricketing culture — and it's where we go next.