IT WAS the most difficult pitch he had played on, claimed Michael Clarke, Australia's cricket captain, after his side were skittled for an embarrassing 60 runs in less than two hours at Trent Bridge yesterday. It wasn't. England's reply of 274 for 4 at the close of play put the lie to that. However, Mr Clarke's comments underlined the extent to which talk of the pitches has come to dominate the current Ashes Test series. Cricket is a game played by two teams, but often a match is dominated by a third force: the pitch. To the untrained eye, cricket wickets all look the same. Each is a 22-yard (20 metre) biscuit-coloured rectangle, surrounded by a field of green. But looks are deceptive. There is a reason why, at the start of a five-day Test match, television commentators can be seen crouching down and running their hands over the surface. The pitch determines the speed at which the ball reaches the batsman, whether it spins or swings, bounces high or low, or whether it does nothing at all and sends the ball through straight. Depending on the pitch, a good score could be 200 or 500. It is widely recognised—though rarely acknowledged—that home sides instruct groundsmen to cultivate pitches that reward their strengths. Even so, in the ongoing Ashes series, this dark art has been pushed near the limits of acceptability. There is a long tradition in England of tweaking pitches to the home team’s advantage, as there is in every cricket-playing nation. Back in 1972—just as in 2015—Australia had the more intimidating bowlers, the first two Tests were shared and the weather heading into the third match was dire. But while the outfield that awaited the teams that year in Leeds was a lush green, the wicket was bare, apparently because of an outbreak of fusarium, a fungus that destroyed the grass. It just so happened that this suited England far more than Australia because, in Derek Underwood, it had one of the great spin bowlers of the age. The ball gripped and spun furiously on the bare surface, and Mr Underwood took ten wickets to settle the match. Pitch-doctoring was never admitted, but as Greg Chappell, the Australian captain, later lamented: “It was uncanny that [the fungus] only attacked a strip 22 yards by eight feet and the rest of the ground was perfectly healthy.” There were similar goings-on at the fifth Test at The Oval in 2009, which England had to win in order to retake the Ashes. Again, in Graeme Swann, England had a clear advantage over Australia in the spin-bowling department. On this occasion The Oval, normally a batting paradise, had a dry and dusty pitch that looked like it belonged on the Indian subcontinent. Without a high-quality spinner, Australia struggled. Mr Swann, meanwhile, had the time of his life and England won the series.

In the current edition of the Ashes, the English certainly appear to be up to their old tricks. In the first two games, at Cardiff and Lord’s, the pitches were exceedingly slow; often the ball did not even carry to the fielders standing behind the wicket. This was presumably a deliberate policy, because Australia have bowlers who can hurl the ball at higher speeds than the English: Mitchell Johnson can touch 95 miles (153 km) per hour, while Mitchell Starc regularly exceeds 90. English bowlers are slower, but more adept at making the ball swing and deviate off the pitch. A sluggish surface should therefore disadvantage English bowlers less than Australian ones.

The strategy worked perfectly in Wales. Mr Johnson, who was England’s torturer-in-chief on fast and bouncy Australian wickets the last time the sides met, bowled 41 overs for almost 200 runs, taking just two wickets. Yet Lord’s showed how imprecise the science of pitch preparation is. Groundsmen must depend on sand, soil and loam, which do not always respond predictably. Although the pitch at Lord’s was presumably intended to encourage the ball to swing, it failed to cooperate, rendering England’s bowlers impotent. Australia racked up a match-winning 566 for 8 in their first innings. In the third game at Edgbaston, the pitch was more traditionally English, and the home side won in less than three days.

The problem for the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), which runs the game in the country, is that it is trying to produce pitches that serve two masters. On one hand, it wants a surface that plays to England’s strengths. On the other, it also wants batsmen-friendly flat pitches, so that Test matches that last for as many of the five scheduled days as possible, in order to appease television companies and maximise ticket (and bar) sales. This is never truer than during the Ashes, Test cricket’s most lucrative and high-profile event.

Some may question the ethics of pitch-doctoring, but its legality has not been questioned. Cricket’s governing body, the International Cricket Council, receives reports from the umpires on the condition of the pitch, but a surface generally has to be extraordinary for the hosts to be cited. In any case, it is probably good for the game. Part of the sport’s appeal is that pitches behave differently all around the world; cricket in the Caribbean should be different from cricket in Cape Town or Kandy. It adds a layer of drama to proceedings, and makes the game much harder for players to master. Only the greats can adjust to all conditions.

After all, there is a third lord that Test-playing nations need to serve: fans. Test cricket needs all the help it can get at the moment, assailed as it is by the popularity of Twenty20 around the world. At its best, the longer format is every bit as captivating as its shorter cousin. For Test matches to maintain their position as the pinnacle of cricket, it must not be forgotten that three days of fun can be better than five days of monotony.