Drop-in pitches are solving a problem cricket did not have

Trays grown off site give stadiums flexibility and give the sport a set of surfaces that behave far too much alike.

The case for the drop-in pitch is a stadium case, not a cricket case. A tray you can lift out with a forklift lets a venue host a football match on Saturday and a Test on Wednesday, and it lets a curator grow the surface somewhere with better light and better drainage than the middle of a bowl surrounded by fifty thousand seats. Those are real advantages and I do not dismiss them.

What they buy is a surface with a manufactured profile. A tray is built in layers: a drainage base, a defined depth of soil with a chosen clay fraction, grass grown into it under controlled conditions. Every variable a traditional square inherits from local geology becomes a specification. And specifications converge, because everybody reads the same research, buys from the same suppliers, and is judged on the same complaint metric, which is producing a match that lasts the scheduled number of days.

The result is a set of surfaces that are hard to distinguish. Reliable carry, even bounce, a small amount of seam early, very little for a finger spinner ever. Perfectly decent cricket. Also cricket in which touring is no longer a test of adaptation, because the away side has already played on something almost exactly like this six weeks ago on a different continent.

I think that loss is bigger than it looks. The reason a subcontinental spinner and a seam bowler from a green, damp country were both world class was that neither could have done the other's job, and touring exposed that. If every square is engineered towards the middle, the sport rewards a single generic skill set and the specialists disappear from squads because there is nowhere to use them.

There is a second, quieter issue. A tray sits on a base rather than on ground, so the way it settles under a heavy roller and the way it holds water at depth differ from a native square. Curators have learned to work with that, but the learning curve at any new installation is measured in seasons, and the matches played during that curve are the ones that get called substandard.

Give me a badly behaved square with a history over a well behaved one with a specification.