A day after the Board of Control for Cricket in India announced the venues for next year's series against England, one of the prominent newspapers in London on Sunday said smaller Test centres were deliberately chosen to provide the home side spinning tracks and render the visiting pacemen less effective.
"If there is any cricketing intent behind the selection of Ahmedabad, Nagpur and Mumbai, it must be that the Board wants three grounds that can provide slow, big-turning pitches. That would play into the hands of India's spinners and make life correspondingly hard for England's quartet of pace bowlers," Scyld Berry wrote in The Daily Telegraph.
He noted that major venues -- Chennai, Bangalore, Delhi and Kolkata -- where a larger number of England supporters could be accommodated -- were conspicuously absent from the schedule of three Tests and seven one-day internationals.
Referring to the ODI venues, Berry said it would be a "logistical nightmare" to fly cricketers and television crews between Indore, Guwahati, Faridabad, Cuttack, Cochin, Visakhapatnam and Goa from April 4 to 22.
Describing the BCCI as an "eccentric organisation," the paper said it was "overwhelmed by political squabbles and lawsuits".
"The Indian Board justified the venues by saying that they had a policy of rotation and that various associations take it in turns to stage home Test matches," Berry said, but claimed "the rotation policy rarely seems to apply to Australia, who are almost always given the main venues".
He signed off by writing, "England must hope that the Indian Board's Working Committee do not ratify the itinerary announced yesterday."
