"Not Good Enough": After Afghanistan Coach, Australia Great Also Criticizes Trinidad's Pitch

Former Australia cricketer Tom Moody gave a huge thumbs-down to the pitch at the Brian Lara Cricket Stadium in Trinidad used for the first semi-final of the ICC Men's T20 World Cup 2024 between South Africa and Afghanistan, saying the surface was not fit to host any cricket match. The pitch offered huge lateral movement for fast bowlers and also offered excessive inconsistent bounce, as some balls flew off the surface, while others stayed really low. Amidst challenging conditions, South Africa were at their fiery best to bowl out Afghanistan for just 56 and chased down the total in 8.5 overs to seal their spot in the final at Barbados on Sunday.

"I don't think you'd want to see it in any game, to be honest with you. You want a fair contest between bat and ball and I'm not advocating that we need to have surfaces that you need 200 runs. But you need a consistent bounce, that is the most important thing. Any batter would hold their hands up and say, that is the most important thing.”

“If you've got one ball that's hitting the toe of your bat or one that you feel like you're going to punch with your gloves at the same length, that is a very difficult challenge to combat. If you've got sidewards movement or swing or spin, that's a different challenge, but at least there's some sort of consistency and you can come up with some sort of strategy and method to combat that and I don't think it was good enough.”

“I actually covered two games in Trinidad at the Brian Lara Cricket Academy and the surface was pretty similar. You see this sort of crazy paving, if I could put it that way, where a lot of dense grass was gathered around those cracks and you could just tell that was the thing that promoted the inconsistency of bounce. So