Drop-in pitches are not the villain, the drainage under them is

Blaming a tray of imported soil for dull cricket ignores the engineered ground it has to sit in for six months.

Every time a stadium hosts football on Wednesday and cricket on Saturday, somebody complains that the pitch was grown in a car park and it shows. The complaint has the wrong target. A block of soil is a block of soil, and if it is the right soil, correctly consolidated and rolled for long enough, it can play beautifully. The problems come from what is underneath and around it.

A modern multi-use stadium is built for drainage speed, which means a deep sand profile that moves water away in minutes. Excellent for a football pitch in November. Not excellent for a cricket square, because a pitch takes its behaviour partly from moisture moving up from below during a match. Sit a heavy clay block in a fast-draining sand bed and the bottom of that block dries differently from a square that has been in place for eighty years. The surface can look identical and age completely wrong.

The other issue is the join. Where the tray meets the surrounding turf there is a seam, and the outfield either side of it is usually a different grass on a different profile. Balls behave oddly there. Fielders feel it. It is a small thing that gets noticed only when a ball keeps low at the edge of the square and somebody blames the curator, who did not build the stadium.

I am not against the technology. Drop-in surfaces have kept cricket in grounds it would otherwise have lost, and in a few venues they have produced better and more consistent pitches than the old squares did, because a tray can be grown for a year under a curator's control rather than being battered by a domestic season.

What I want is honesty about the timeline. A drop-in needs years of preparation and repeated use to settle into a character, and boards keep commissioning them eight months before a tournament and then acting surprised.

You cannot rush soil. It sits there consolidating at its own rate, indifferent to the fixture list. One of the few things left in professional sport that money genuinely cannot accelerate.