NEIL MANTHORP: How banning spit will change cricket
The game could well become even more batsman-friendly than it already is
Throughout the 1990s and most of the 2000s senior Indian cricket correspondents were known to become ill and unable to travel shortly before their country played a Test match at Green Park in Kanpur. They appointed their deputies to cover it, or even a keen but naive junior reporter. As one senior scribe told me, becoming “ill” before the Test was a pre-emptive strike.
Whereas Australia simply refused to sanction an itinerary with the venue on it, the Proteas were invited to play a Test match there on three out of four tours from 1996 to 2008. A week before the first of those a photograph was published in a Kolkata newspaper showing the grass on the Green Park outfield at least a half a metre high. It was a meadow...
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