A home board should be allowed to prepare the pitch it wants

Complaints about doctored surfaces usually come from teams who have simply run out of ways to win away from home.

The accusation goes up about twice a year. Somebody prepares a raging turner, or a green seamer that lasts two and a half days, and the losing side calls it a poor surface and the governing body sends an assessment form. I have never found the argument convincing, and I think the desire for uniform pitches is the least interesting idea in cricket administration.

Start with what a pitch is. It is soil, in a climate, prepared by people who have worked with that soil for decades. A ground in a humid coastal city with heavy black soil and forty degrees of heat is never going to behave like a ground with a shallow loam profile and cloud cover in May, and pretending otherwise means importing soil and micromanaging preparation until every venue produces the same neutral surface. That is not fairness. It is the removal of the single most distinctive thing about touring.

Home advantage in cricket has always been partly about conditions and mostly about the fact that one side grew up playing on them. Nobody complains that a side raised on bouncy pitches bowls short well. That advantage arrives through upbringing rather than through a roller, so it is considered natural, which is a distinction of manners rather than of substance.

Where I do accept a limit is safety and contest. A surface with genuinely dangerous variable bounce on day one is not a challenge, it is a lottery, and a Test that ends inside two days sells no tickets and teaches nobody anything. There is a real line, and it should be drawn on behaviour, on how the ball comes on and how the bounce varies, rather than on how much the ball turns.

Turn is not a defect. It has been treated as one for years by a system whose reference point is a seaming surface, and that reference point is a historical accident rather than a law of the game.

Prepare your pitch. Win at home. Then go and be uncomfortable somewhere else, and let that be the sport.