A drop-in pitch never really arrives at the ground

Growing a surface in a tray somewhere else solves a stadium's scheduling problem and quietly removes the venue's character.

The tray is grown in a nursery, on its own soil, to its own recipe, and then trucked into a stadium that hosts football on Saturday and cricket on Wednesday. It works. That is the point of it and it is not a small achievement, because plenty of venues would host no cricket at all without the arrangement.

But something goes missing, and the sport has been slow to say what.

A traditional pitch is continuous with what is underneath it. Whatever drainage, subsoil, water table and history that ground has, the surface sits on it and behaves accordingly, which is why particular venues developed particular reputations over decades and why touring sides had to prepare for a place rather than a country. A drop-in is a slab. It has an interface at its base rather than a gradient, and moisture moves through it differently, which tends to produce a surface with less variation over five days than the same soil would give if it had been grown in place.

That flattening is what you see in the cricket. Drop-ins are often excellent for three days and then decline in a way that is oddly uniform, because the layer that would normally break up unevenly is a manufactured block with consistent composition. Wear happens, but it happens tidily. Reverse swing arrives late because the square is often lush and the outfield is a football outfield, kept soft and green for a sport that needs it that way.

I have a mild objection to how this gets discussed, which is that critics blame the concept when they are actually seeing a young pitch. A tray in its first season has not settled. The same tray four years later, having been used and rolled and repaired, behaves much more like a normal surface, and several venues that were mocked early are now producing decent cricket.

The real cost is not technical. It is that the home advantage a team gets from knowing a surface intimately gets thinner when the surface is a product with a specification, and a sport whose great charm is that no two grounds are the same is trading a little of that away for fixture flexibility.

I would take the flexibility. I would just like somebody to admit what was sold to get it.