Drop-in pitches made the game fairer and duller

Standardising surfaces removed the thing that made touring hard, and touring being hard was most of the point.

A drop-in pitch is grown in a tray somewhere off site, trucked in, and dropped into a slot in the middle of a stadium that also has to host concerts and two other sports. It is a triumph of logistics. Any venue using one will happily tell you how many hours of scheduling misery it saves.

It also produces, with impressive reliability, the same cricket pitch.

Because the tray is a controlled environment, the soil profile is uniform through its depth in a way a square rolled and re-rolled for ninety years never is. Predictable bounce. A surface that does not break up much, because the layer underneath is not the natural clay of that region, it is whatever the contractor specified. Batters know what they are getting from the first ball. Lovely for a broadcaster selling a five-day product. Grim for anyone who liked the idea that a ground had a character of its own.

Home advantage used to be a physical fact rather than a talking point. You grew up on a square that gripped by tea on day two, or one that seamed every morning because the water table sat high, and your technique was built by it. A touring side arrived and had a fortnight to solve a problem the hosts had spent their childhoods on. That is not unfairness. That is the sport, and it is why an away series win used to mean what it meant.

Now the away team increasingly arrives and finds a pitch that behaves the way pitches behave everywhere.

I will grant the counterargument. The extreme version of home preparation, a surface turning square inside an hour and producing a two-day Test, is bad for everybody, and there has been a fair amount of that. Nobody wants a lottery. But the answer to a bad pitch was never to make every pitch identical. It was to make bad pitches embarrassing, which the sanctions regime handles perfectly well on the rare occasions anyone enforces it.

There is a quieter cost. Bowlers develop by being forced to find something on a surface that offers nothing, and batters develop by being made uncomfortable in their own back yard. A generation raised on trays gets neither education, and it shows the first time they land somewhere the ball keeps low and the bounce is uneven.

Uniformity is a fine ambition for a football pitch. Cricket was never that sport. Every time a square is replaced by a tray, something specific goes with it, and it does not come back.