Cricket World Cup: The long path to preparing the WC final pitch

Sunday's World Cup final has the potential to be a career highlight for 22 players, especially the 11 who finish on the MCG in the victory photo. But even the beaten players have a chance to try again in four years.

There is no question of significance when it comes to David Sandurski. For good reasons or bad it will be the biggest moment of his career, as the head curator of what will be the first drop-in pitch used for a World Cup final.

If his pitch is good — which, in the current one-day environment, means conducive to teams blasting north of 300 runs — Sandurski will rate less than a footnote when it comes to analysis of the result. That is just how he would like it to be: unobtrusive.

If it is bad, well, it is a prospect not worth thinking about given the unrivalled  - in cricket – significance of the match. But given the amount of meticulous preparation involved it is unlikely. Sandurski is, like many supporters of Australia and New Zealand, looking to the match with nervous optimism.

The path to selecting and preparing the World Cup final pitch happened long before they were dropped in place in early October. It came about this time last year when the pitches, all 10 of them, were lifted up by the giant hoist and taken into nearby Yarra Park for a winter of recuperation and hibernation from the just-concluded cricket season.

The pitches are scraped, to remove all the turf damaged by a season of footmarks, replenished with fresh turf and then sprayed with insecticide, fungicide and herbicide, and then virtually left untouched for three months when Melbourne's weather is at its coldest.

"I want to get them healthy and strong to go into that dormant period," Sandurski explained.

Sandurski now has 12 drop-in pitches for a block of 10. It allows him to every year give two pitches a cricket-free season to improve their strength.

Drop-in pitches are shedding, albeit gradually, the negative reputation they have among cricketing purists. The reason for them is simple: at venues with significant winter demands on them, such as two or three football matches per weekend in the case of the MCG, the centre of the ground is much softer with turf that is not a wicket block during summer. But not having pitches permanently in place does, as the stereotype goes, make it harder to preserve their unique characteristics.

In Sandurski's previous role — he was in charge of Allan Border Field in Brisbane, a venue used exclusively for cricket throughout the year — he just dealt with traditional permanent pitches. While initially wary of the drop-ins it did not take him long to subscribe to the theory imparted on him from his MCG predecessor Cameron Hodgkins, that there was "not a great deal of difference" between drop-ins and full-time pitches.

"I suppose you can be a little bit sceptical to them because while they're not . . . artificial they're manufactured wickets instead of the traditional method. But you've got to choose what method is right for your situation. Here, if you left the wickets in the ground for the football season there'd be no grass on them come cricket season, so for Melbourne it's a perfect fit," he said.

For much of Melbourne's population September means footy finals. For Sandurski it meant preparing his chosen 10 for their biannual move, including a "matrix" of which pitch would be placed where, and for which matches they would be used. Among those chosen 10 was his chosen one, the one he had in mind for the final. Such decisions are partly based on evidence - he has a dossier on how each pitch has performed, in terms of runs and wickets scored on it – with the rest coming down to aesthetics and intuition.

This season's move was complicated by the MCG being completely resurfaced for the first time in 11 years. As the pitches were being lifted into place, at a rate of three or four a night, they were taken onto an arena that was being progressively shorn of grass, and instead left with sand which, if it were to blow into the hole in the centre left for the pitches, would undermine those pitches significantly.

"A sand surface, compared to a clay surface, is soft, so it would have a cushioning effect on the ball, where as clay goes rock hard and it bounces like concrete. You can't get sand hard. It's like trying to bowl on a beach," Sandurski explained.

The strategy to combat this required the erection of the metre-high silk fence, and wetting  the sand in the surrounding areas to stop sand particles being blown in. The ultimate test of that came on September 30, when Melbourne was buffeted by a wind storm severe enough to have bent some of the star pickets that held the silk in place - but, crucially, the fence did its job.

That storm was the first of two successfully defended against in the first month. The storm that  arrived on  November 26 was far more severe than predicted and would have set back preparation by at least a week if he had used the mid-level cover that would have sufficed for a minor storm. Instead, he got his crew to fit the full-size one.

"The one thing you learn pretty early on in this industry is you try and control the weather, rather than letting the weather control you. That's the reason you always take those precautions and go to bigger rather than smaller," he said, recalling when as an apprentice he was caught out by trusting the weather report.

"It could only be the slightest spike mark in a cover that leaves a hole in it, or even when the wind is strong it can lift the corner of a cover up and . . . you can have one wet end of the wicket.

"When you get that cover off in the morning and it's nice and dry — bone dry — it's always a good feeling."

Australia's limited-overs series against South Africa preceding the Test series attracted little attention, and even fewer spectators, due to clashing events such as the spring racing carnival and the general preference to attend limited-over matches after Christmas.

The second Twenty20 international in that series was huge for Sandurski, because it was a dry run for the pitch he hoped to deploy for the World Cup final. That South Africa made only 7-101 would have been a cause for concern, had it not been for the positive report he got from the teams after the match that blamed the batsmen for the Proteas' paltry score.

"Like a batsman, you like to get a few runs on the board early, so you can get a feel of how they're going and get used to making them," he said. "There's a couple of minor things I can fix up, but that's probably over-analysing things a bit too much. It's definitely a relief to know that wicket is good enough as it is now."

Besides being played on, the main source of damage for pitches is when they're located directly next to the pitch being used in a match, because batsmen dig into it with their spikes while running between the wickets. For that reason, the key period for the World Cup pitch was the Boxing Day Test, which was played on the pitch directly next to it.

As Sandurski surveyed the prospective World Cup final pitch on New Year's Eve he acknowledged the batsmen had "set it back a fair bit". But his confidence it would recover, even in a summer much cooler than he had for, proved well-founded as it was back to pristine condition for Australia's World Cup opener against England on February 14.

Once that match was completed without incident, and then later the quarter-final between India and Bangladesh, Sandurski and his crew were able to focus on making the wicket table as clean as possible and then beginning a process that was, to an outsider, surprisingly pivotal: deciding when to start rolling the pitch, generally for three hour-long stints every day until match day.

"The first one is the one you've got to get right," he explained. "It's pretty much the moisture content of the pitch [that determines when is the right time to start rolling]. If it's too wet you can make a mess of it. If you get on too dry you won't get enough compaction to make it able to bounce really well and truly. There's about a 15-minute window to get in there – and you've just got to get it right.

"It's just experience that tells you when to go. I like to walk up and down the pitch a few times and gauge where it's at. It's just that experience that tells you when is the right time to get on it.

"I'm happy we're using this pitch because it's definitely the best one on the table. That doesn't mean it's going to play the best but we've got the best one available to be used," he said. "For this one, recovery pretty much goes out the window. This one is going to be pushed to the absolute limit. It's a World Cup final; you have to do whatever it takes."

Once the match is completed the focus turns on returning the final seven pitches — three have already been removed — to Yarra Park, so football can resume on the MCG on Thursday night and the pitches can begin their six months of slumber. It will also be an opportunity for Sandurski to reacquaint himself with his family, who have played second fiddle for the much of the summer and especially the past fortnight.

"I'm pretty much a stranger the whole summer. They were warned before we moved down here that that would be the case," he joked.

Graphic