South Africa has always been a bowling paradise for pace bowlers. Indian batters struggled historically, to score on these pitches. Sachin Tendulkar scored highest among all batters including SA batters with 1741 runs in Test matches featuring both teams. He scored huge even in South Africa when Alan Donald, Shaun Pollock have been at their peak in mid-90’s.
Newlands or Capetown, Centurion, Johannesburg have been historically helpful to pacers, too. But the pitches have been helpful to pacers in first session and then they used to become batting paradises on 2nd and 3rd days. From 4th, 5th SA pacers used to find helpful bounce and variable bounce to exploit the conditions well.
Indian team touring to South Africa did not have great pace bowling attack except for one or two reliable pacers. Javagal Srinath, Zaheer Khan, Sreesanth, Irfan Pathan have been highly successful on these pitches for India. They used to rely more on swing and SA batters could negate them easily. But Jasprit Bumrah, Ishanth Sharma have added additional pace to the attack and that helped India win at least one test per series in South Africa.
But in this series, South Africa and India both have finished both the Tests in 3 days and 2 days, respectively. India lost the first Test in 3 days but came back to win the second test in 107 overs. It has become the shortest match ever in Test history. The pitch at Newlands has come under scanner post the result. Many experts have said that while spin friendly pitches in India are being called as dust bowls these kind of pace paradises should also be condemned.
Rohit Sharma, Indian Captain, stated that he doesn’t mind such pitches as they offer a challenge to them when they tour in other countries. At the same time, he stated that other countries should be ready to play in spin-friendly pitches in India, too. Well, it would be better for ICC to prepare rules about ideal pitches or allow each country to prepare such helpful pitches. For now though, India vs South Africa Second Test at Capetown will be discussed for long despite being a short test match.