Proteas coach Ottis Gibson has defended host nations’ right to prepare cricket pitches that suit them.
This comes on the back on criticism from Pakistan counterpart Mickey Arthur who moaned about the tracks at Centurion and Newlands as his team fell to an unrecoverable 2-0 deficit in the three-Test series.
Gibson labelled former South African national team coach Arthur’s comment “a little bit strange” after the Newlands clash this weekend.
And the West Indian adds: “If you get pitches that suit your attack, every other country does it.
“Therefore we will continue to do it, until the ICC says to everybody ‘this is the standard pitch you prepare for Test cricket’, and everybody plays on it and it’s a level playing field for everybody.
MOAN: Pak's Mickey Arthur. Photo: Dave Hunt/EPA
“But at the moment, when you go away from home, you take what you get. We did that in Sri Lanka and it wasn’t nice. It wasn’t comfortable and we lost horribly.”
Heading into the third and final Test at the Wanderers, all eyes will be on the strip prepared after the ICC deemed the conditions unfit for a match when SA hosted India there last year.
The venue received three demerit points then and if it reaches five, the ground will be suspended from hosting an international for 12 months.
Asked if conditions for hosts were too unbalanced, Gibbo says: “No, not yet. If [the ICC] think it’s gone too far, that’s their decision to make. It’s not my decision.”