Ratings, Doctoring and Famous Pitches
Who judges a pitch, and how? Who's allowed to tilt it? How did we get the surfaces we have? And which strips of earth became legends? The finale of the series — a tour of cricket's most contested, and most beloved, twenty-two yards.
By The Cricket Daily Desk · 16 min read
In the 2025-26 Ashes, two Test matches ended inside two days. Both were over almost before they began: batters fell in a heap, the cricket was brutal and brief. And yet the game's authorities looked at the two pitches and reached opposite verdicts. The first, at Perth, they rated "very good." The fourth, at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, they rated "unsatisfactory" and docked the venue a demerit point. Same series, same two-day carnage — opposite judgements. Why?
That puzzle is the perfect doorway into the last part of our story. We've spent eight parts on what a pitch is and how it behaves. This final part is about what we do with all that: how pitches are judged, who's allowed to tip them in the home side's favour, how the surfaces we play on today came to exist — and, to finish, a tour of the grounds whose pitches became characters in their own right.
The judge
After every Test match, one official sits down and grades the pitch. He is the ICC match referee — a neutral former player appointed to oversee the game — and he rates both the pitch and the outfield against a fixed scale. Since a rewrite in 2023, that scale has four rungs: very good, satisfactory, unsatisfactory, and unfit.
The bottom two rungs carry punishment, in the form of demerit points attached not to the team but to the ground itself. An "unsatisfactory" pitch earns the venue one demerit point; an "unfit" one earns three. The points sit on a five-year rolling tally, and they bite: reach five demerits and the ground is banned from hosting international cricket for twelve months; reach ten and the ban doubles to two years. It is the closest cricket has to a referee blowing a whistle on the playing surface.
Now back to our puzzle. The key thing the rating system is asking is not "how long did the match last?" but "was it a fair contest?" A short Test is not automatically a bad one. At Perth, nineteen wickets tumbled on the first day — but on the second the surface calmed down, and a batter made a hundred at a run a ball while his side chased the target. The pitch had simply been lively early and then behaved: a fair fight, rated very good. At Melbourne the pitch never let up — twenty wickets fell on day one and sixteen more on day two, and not a single batter on either side reached fifty. The curator had left extra grass on it, and it seamed viciously from first ball to last. One analytics firm rated it the hardest pitch to bat on in Australia in the twenty years they'd been measuring. That is what "unsatisfactory" punishes: not a quick result, but a surface so loaded that batting was never a real contest. A pitch can be fast and thrilling; it crosses the line when it stops being a fair fight.
The case files
A few pitches have become reference points in this debate, each marking a different kind of line being crossed.
Pune, 2017. India, almost unbeatable at home, prepared a surface that turned savagely from the first morning against Australia — and lost, bowled out for 105 and 107, beaten by 333 runs inside three days. The match referee rated the pitch "poor," the rare public condemnation of an Indian Test surface, and a reminder that a pitch cooked to beat the tourists can just as easily devour the hosts.
Ahmedabad, 2021. A day-night Test against England, played with the pink ball, finished inside two days on a furious turner — neither side passed 150, and one spinner ran through both innings. By the logic above, you might expect a sanction; instead the ICC rated it merely "average," a verdict widely seen as soft, and a sign of how unevenly the line is policed from country to country.
And the extreme end: Kingston, Jamaica, 1998. England against the West Indies on a cracked, ridged Sabina Park pitch from which the ball flew off a length and battered the batters. After just over ten overs — fifty-six minutes, England 17 for 3 — the umpires stopped the match and abandoned it as dangerous. It was the first time in 122 years of Test cricket that a game was called off because of the state of the pitch itself. When a surface stops being unfair and starts being unsafe, even the contest is set aside.
The politics of a tilted table
All of which leads to the argument that never ends: doctoring. Here is the thing that makes cricket unique among major sports. A tennis court, a football pitch, a basketball floor are all standardised to the centimetre — identical in Melbourne and in Manchester. Cricket alone hands the home team the keys to the field of play and, in effect, says: shape it to suit yourselves. Preparing a pitch to favour your own bowlers is legal, ancient, and universal. The only question is how far is too far.
And the policing of that question is lopsided in a way worth noticing. A turning pitch that ends a Test in under three days draws howls of outrage; a flat, lifeless "road" that strangles a match into a bloodless draw over five draws barely a murmur — even though it, too, has wrecked the contest. The spinning track gets called a disgrace while the featherbed gets called dull, and only one of them gets a demerit point.
It cuts every way, which is why it's better seen as universal than as anyone's particular sin. India is accused of ordering day-one turn; but England's captain Ben Stokes has openly told groundstaff he wanted "fast, flat pitches" to suit his side's aggressive batting, and green, seaming decks in England and Australia tilt the table just as surely as dust does in India. There's even a counter-intuitive twist: a truly extreme turner can backfire on the home side, because it makes the game such a lottery that the visitors get a puncher's chance — whereas a pitch that turns slowly from day three keeps maximum control in home hands. Every host tilts the table. The match referee is simply the game's imperfect, and not always consistent, judge of when the tilt has gone too far.
How we got the pitches we have
The surfaces at the centre of all these arguments are themselves the product of a long evolution — and the pitch you watch today would be almost unrecognisable to a cricketer of a century ago.
For most of cricket's history, pitches were left uncovered, open to the weather even overnight. Rain followed by hot sun baked a wet surface into a "sticky wicket" — a drying, gluey top on which the ball reared, spat and behaved like a live thing. Batting on a sticky was a lottery, and the craft of surviving one was among the most prized in the game. Then, after a rain-ruined Test at Lord's in 1980, full covering of pitches became standard. The weather was shut out, and the true sticky wicket all but vanished from the sport — a whole genre of cricket gone, traded for fairness and consistency.
The next leap was even stranger: pitches you can pick up and move. In 1977, to stage Kerry Packer's breakaway World Series Cricket in stadiums never built for the game, a Perth curator named John Maley grew pitches off-site in giant trays and craned them into the arena — the first "drop-in" pitches. (Maley reckoned he once worked 207 days straight to do it.) Grown in concrete trays weighing fifty tons apiece and lowered into place, drop-ins let a single stadium host cricket one week and football the next; they are now standard at the MCG, in Adelaide, and across New Zealand. The pitch had become portable.
And underneath it all, quietly, the science we met earlier in this series — laser-levelling, benchmarked soils, measured rolling — made modern pitches flatter, truer and far kinder to batting than the rough surfaces of the past. That is the real reason today's debate is about "result pitches versus roads" rather than about surviving a minefield: agronomy mostly won the battle for safety, and left us arguing about entertainment.
The famous ones
Because every pitch is local — a product of its soil, its climate, its groundsman and its history — a handful of grounds have developed personalities as distinct as any player's. To close the series, a short tour.
Lord's, in London, is the most characterful of all, because its entire square is built on a slope: the ground falls about two and a half metres — over eight feet — diagonally from one side to the other. That tilt is enough to bend a cricket ball, helping bowlers swing and seam it across the pitch, and generations of bowlers have learned to use the slope as a silent ally. It is cricket's oldest and most genteel home-ground advantage, hidden in plain sight.
From there the personalities fan out across the cricketing world. Perth, in Australia, is the fastest and bounciest pitch on earth, a fast bowler's dream where the surface can open into wide "snake cracks." The Gabba in Brisbane offers pace and steep, honest bounce and was for decades an Australian fortress. Galle, in Sri Lanka, is a near-guaranteed turner where the spinners are in business from the first session. Eden Gardens in Kolkata turns as it wears and wraps it all in an atmosphere Steve Waugh rated among the most intimidating in the game. The Wanderers in Johannesburg sits roughly 1,750 metres above sea level — about 5,750 feet — and in that thin Highveld air the ball carries further and swings less, which is why it's nicknamed the Bullring. And Newlands in Cape Town is shaped less by altitude (a common mix-up — that's the Wanderers) than by the famous "Cape Doctor" wind that helps the ball swing. Each is a reminder that in cricket, the venue is never just a backdrop.
The thirteenth man
And that is where this series ends. We began with a simple question — what is that strip of brown earth in the middle, and why does it matter so much? — and the answer turned out to run through soil chemistry, the swelling of clay, the curator's craft, five days of slow decay, the reading of cues, the gamble of the toss, and the tactics of a whole match.
Underneath all of it is one fact that makes cricket unlike any other sport. The field of play is alive, and it is local. Twenty-two yards of clay that breathes, cracks, dusts and dies over five days, and that no two grounds — and no two days — ever quite repeat. It is judged by a referee, fought over by boards, doctored and defended and adored. The pitch is not the stage cricket is played on. It is cricket's co-author, and the home team's quiet thirteenth man — and once you can read it, you are never quite watching the same game again.