Sunil Gavaskar, who has the Royal Suite in the pantheon of Indian openers, once said that he wished he could roll up the pitch at the Queen's Park Oval in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and carry it around with him wherever he batted. You could forgive Shiv Sunder Das for harbouring similar thoughts about the track at the Vidarbha Cricket Association Stadium in Nagpur. It might be the antithesis of a sporting wicket, but for Das, it has a special attraction, magic of a three-figure kind. He likes the opposition too - Das took Zimbabwe for a hundred the last time they met on this featherbed, and also finished with the highest run aggregate when India toured there last June. For a change, he actually hung around long enough to convert a good start into a hundred. For a while now, followers of Indian cricket have worried that Das might become India's answer to Stephen Fleming. New Zealand's captain is a high-class batsman, as elegant and stylish a left-hander as any in the game, but his ratio when it comes to converting fifties into hundreds is simply appalling. Since that century against Zimbabwe in his debut series, Das had travelled along the same highway – plenty of starts, but an aversion to three digits.

His innings today was something of a roller-coaster effort. There were periods when he was right on top, cutting and driving with fluency and control, and making the bowling look as ordinary as it was. But there were also times when he lapsed into strokeless-wonder mode, wafting at deliveries outside off and seemingly unable to rotate the strike. He had 19 fours in his 105, and while that indicates a genuine ability to pierce the field, it also illustrates a worrying tendency on the part of the Indian batsmen to eschew singles.

With Rahul Dravid back to his efficient worker-ant best, you had to feel sorry for Zimbabwe. Spare a thought, though, for all those involved with this match. Around the time that Das was easing his way to a hundred, Australia were off to their by-now-customary biff-bang-wallop start in Johannesburg. Compared to that, the Indian innings was a slow-motion replay. And as long as we continue to produce pitches like these, that won't change. If you have a Michelangelo – and Indian cricket has one in Sachin Tendulkar – give him a Sistine Chapel to work on, not a decrepit hovel. It's time for the Indian Board's pitches and grounds committee to swap big talk for action.

Dileep Premachandran is assistant editor of Wisden.com India.

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