Home advantage is a travel schedule, not a pitch

We keep explaining home records with soil and spin when the fixture list explains most of it.

Every touring side loses a series and every post-mortem arrives at the same place. The pitches. The ball turned square from day one, the surface was prepared to order, the hosts picked three spinners and the visitors could not cope. Sometimes that is exactly what happened. But it has become such a satisfying explanation that we have stopped looking at the boring one sitting next to it.

A touring team arrives after a long flight, plays two warm-up games against opposition that has no incentive to test them properly, and then starts a Test. They sleep in a different bed every four nights. Their families are somewhere else. Their support staff is a fraction of the size it is at home, and half of it is doing two jobs. The home side drives to the ground.

I am not claiming the pitch does nothing. I am claiming that if you handed both teams an identical, entirely neutral surface, the home side would still win more often than not, and by a margin that would surprise people who have spent a decade blaming curators. Travel fatigue is a measurable performance cost in every sport that has bothered to measure it. Cricket asks more of it than most, because the tours are longer and the recovery windows are shorter.

There is a test of this that nobody wants to run. Compare a side's record away in conditions similar to home with its record away in conditions unlike home. If pitches were doing all the work, the first number should look close to a home record. It does not. It sits much nearer the second, which suggests that being away is itself most of the penalty.

The practical consequence is that boards are solving the wrong problem. They spend enormous energy negotiating over surfaces and almost none on the schedule, which is the variable they actually control. Arrive ten days earlier. Play one proper game rather than two token ones. Stop starting a Test forty-eight hours after a flight across six time zones.

It would make touring sides better and it would make the cricket better, and it would take away the excuse everyone reaches for first. Which is possibly why nobody is in a hurry.