This series seemed an ideal opportunity for the Indians to get their confidence back against relatively easy opposition, for the out-of-touch players to play themselves back into form, for defects to be ironed out. Sadly, the groundsmen didn't see it that way.

There is a saying in Hindi, "apne hi paer pe kulhadi maarna" (hitting your own foot with your axe). That is exactly what India have done by preparing substandard pitches at Nagpur and Delhi. With what promises to be a tough tour of the West Indies coming up, India need bouncy, sporting pitches which have something for the batsmen as well as the bowlers, and don't spin excessively or deteriorate as Indian pitches tend to do.

Instead, Nagpur and Delhi have both provided quintessentially Indian flat-track-bully dream pitches, where the bounce gets lower and lower as the match goes on, where the ball comes on to the bat so slowly that it inhibits strokeplay, and where only the spinners feel at home - albeit, surely, a trifle guiltily, at being given such an unfair advantage.

The scoring rates amply demonstrate this. On the third day at Nagpur, India made just 224 runs, despite having Tendulkar at the crease all day. Zimbabwe did not have the spinners to exploit the conditions – though Ray Price bowled valiantly – and there was nothing in it for the pacemen. And today, India made just 80 runs in the third session, Tendulkar's contribution being 12 off 80 balls. True, the bowling was excellent – within its limitations – and Sachin's circumspection might well have been because he was aware that this was a great chance to make his 29th hundred, but on a different pitch, the man who has made Shane Warne look like a club-level tweaker would have launched into Price and hit him out of the attack.

So why is that bad for India? Because pitches like this do not provide a true enough indication of the performance of the players. Look at Sourav Ganguly. Hell, 78 not out with nary a chance seems like a pretty good effort, and you'd be forgiven for thinking he's back in business. But is he really? His weakness is against the rising ball; on this pitch, anything pitched short came on so slowly that he even had time to essay a few impressive pulls, like Jayasuriya in slow-motion. He got the runs all right, but his achilles heel wasn't exposed here. A little confidence and some work in the nets might well solve that problem, but that's an imponderable, and shouldn't be. If he is found out in the West Indies, it'll be too late to drop him and the balance of the team will be severely affected.

Naysayers will of course moan that these are the native conditions of our country, that pitches are determined by soil-quality and weather and yaddah yaddah yaddah, and that authorities cannot do anything about it. Bovine manure. As Sambit Bal points out in the editorial of the March issue of Wisden Asia Cricket (rush out and buy it), there is plenty of recent precedent to the contrary.

The pitches in Bangalore's Chinnaswamy Stadium were dug up recently and the clay-content enhanced. The result was a corker of a pitch that bounced as if it thought it was in Perth. An even more recent example was the Vadodara pitch where Baroda played their Ranji Trophy quarter-finals and semi-finals. It had tinges of a refreshing pastoral green, played true throughout, bounced and moved considerably and did not deteriorate into a spinner's paradise. VVS Laxman made a fine hundred against Baroda in the quarters, playing for Hyderabad, and was quoted as saying that it made for good practice before this series (such irony). More tellingly, Zaheer Khan took ten wickets in each match, an inconceivable feat for a pacer until recently.

It would have helped India immensely had they played these Tests on pitches like those. Now, the vicious circle that has been haunting us for years may well continue: lose abroad, come back and prepare dust-bowl pitches that help us regain confidence but do not prepare us for our next test overseas, go back abroad, lose and come back and ... a sad story, a sad sentence, desperately in need of a full-stop.

Amit Varma is assistant editor of Wisden.com India.

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