After the end of the opening day of the second Test against the visitors Windies at Hyderabad, Indian pacer Umesh Yadav raised the question on the present SG ball and also feels that the wicket is quite flat.
On Friday morning, the Windies captain Jason Holder decided to bat first after winning the toss. While at one stage the visitors were struggling on 113/5, Roston Chase’s brilliant unbeaten 98 off 174 balls (7 fours and only six) and the skipper Jason Holder’s 52 helped the team to stay in the fight as they were batting on 295/7 at the stumps on day one.
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In the tough period, Chase had two crucial partnerships to rescue the team and those two partnerships were the 69-run partnership for the sixth wicket with Shane Dowrich (30) and 104-run partnership for the seventh wicket with Jason Holder.
At the end of the day’s play, Indian pacer Umesh Yadav shared his feeling about the wicket as he has felt that the pitch is quite flat where the ball wasn’t swinging or producing reverse-swing too much.
Yadav said according to icc-cricket.com, “I didn’t think the ball was swinging too much on that wicket, nor did it reverse as much. I think the pitch is quite flat, so it is very important to contain the batsmen, bowl in the same areas. [But] as much as we tried, it was difficult to contain runs. I thought it would become very difficult [for me] if I just looked to contain, so I went for wickets. I had to stay positive.”
On the opening day of the Test match, the right-arm pacer Umesh Yadav (3/83) and the left-arm chinaman Kuldeep Yadav (3/74) both picked up three wickets each.
After the Indian off-spinner Ravichandran Ashwin and the Indian skipper Virat Kohli, Umesh Yadav also opened up his voice against the new quality of SG ball as he feels that the ball is going soft at the early stage.
Umesh Yadav said on the SG ball, “In India when the ball gets old, you neither get pace nor bounce, so then your options become limited. So when the tail-enders come, they are well aware that the ball isn’t doing much, so it becomes easier for them. The SG ball goes soft after 20 overs, so when a new batsman comes it isn’t quite as difficult.”
