The pitches

The world's most famous cricket ground, Lord's in London, home of Marylebone Cricket Club, imports the soil for its pitches from the nearby county of Essex. "Soil comes with a certain clay content - the higher the clay content, usually the higher the standard of cricket," said Adrian Morgan, a groundsman at Lord's, which was also home to the ICC until it relocated to Dubai in 2005.

"Club cricketers would use a lower clay content, and a special mix would be used for the [first class] counties." The type of soil used for the square at Lord's is called Ongar Loam Plus, and comprises 30 per cent clay, 40 per cent silt and 30 per cent sand.

Ironically, this has produced pitches in recent years that have been deemed "too good" for exciting cricket. Because the soil remains bound together for longer, the pitch keeps a true bounce later into the match, which allows batsmen to score more runs but fails to provide an even contest between bat and ball. Not all pitches in England retain the same characteristics. At Old Trafford the steep bounce offered by the hard pitch assists fast bowlers. Grounds such as Headingley and Edgbaston generally aid swing bowlers.

Pitches in India and Pakistan are often referred to as dust bowls, which are generally considered to favour spin bowling. The surface on the batting wicket usually cracks and crumbles quickly. The worn pitch then becomes more conducive to spin bowling. However, the surfaces behave differently even within each country. At Mumbai's Brabourne stadium, where England will play a Test match in December, the red soil wicket turns to dust very quickly, helping spin bowlers turn the ball prodigiously.

When the ground played host to the Champions Trophy in 2006, the pitches deteriorated at such a rate that the curator was obliged to spray the strip with glue to bind it together for the 100-over duration of the match. However, the Punjab Cricket Association ground, 1,637km away in Mohali, near Chandigarh in northern India, tends to play very differently. The pitches there are normally covered more densely with grass than elsewhere in India, which serves to knit the soil together for longer. Pitches in Pakistan are generally a batsman's paradise, with the Indian captain, Mahendra Dhoni, recently describing Karachi as having "the flattest pitch in the world".

The former Australia batsman Darren Lehmann hinted at the importance of the batting surface to the game of cricket by blaming it for his extended exile from the Test team. "One of the biggest gripes I had with the Australian selectors over the years is that they totally discount runs made by batsmen in Adelaide, yet pick bowler after bowler who take wickets in Brisbane," he wrote in his autobiography,

"When a batsman who played at the Adelaide Oval [his home ground] made 1,000 runs a season, they were labelled 'flat track bullies'." By intimation, the pitch in Brisbane favours quicker bowlers because of its high bounce, while the atmospheric conditions in Queensland also help the ball swing. Lehmann actually opted to move to Victoria, where he played alongside Shane Warne at the Melbourne Cricket Ground as he tried to shake off his reputation as a "flat track bully".

Overall, pitches in Australia are regarded as the fastest in the world, with an added bounce which players from the subcontinent are said to struggle with most. If the soil which is being imported for DSC has the same effect, the likes of Mahendra Dhoni could make the short flight across from India to the UAE in order to prepare for future series in Australia.