I found it interesting that among all the speculation about the green tinge on the WACA wicket and the possible implications for team selection the only actual explanation of the phenomenon I could find was hidden away in the side bar of an article at Cricinfo with the headline Australia undecided on all-pace attack.

We knew that already, but it's always interesting to know the underlying factors, which is why you always need to talk to the groundsman or whoever's in charge of preparing the wicket square.

Cricket pitches are interesting exercises, and there's definitely more to these matters than meets the eye. It's not just a matter of a quick squiz that suggests it's a bit green, or an exploratory thumbprint that suggests it's a bit soft. You need to do a bit of the old Julius Sumner Miller and ask why is it so?

And you need to follow that explanation with an extrapolation, If that's why it's so, what does it all mean?

Cricket pitches need to be hard and flat, which is, along with the fact that your back yard probably wasn't big enough, the reason behind the failure of that cricket pitch you mowed in the back yard when you were a kid to host international matches.

There were other factors, of course, but regardless of those childhood dreams your back yard pitch probably hadn't been rolled to the required hardness and your common or garden lawnmower wouldn't have been able to shave the grass down to the required level.

Rolling is important because you need a hard flat surface to get something approaching the right degree of bounce, but that hardness doesn't sit well with certain other codes, which explains the use of drop in wicket squares at Australian grounds that also host AFL matches.

Having footballers jumping up and down on your wicket square probably doesn't do it a whole lot of good either, because it's not just what's on the top that counts. You need the right foundations, and repeated impacts over a long period (a la AFL players landing after taking a high mark) is going to cause compaction, to the point where wicket squares occasionally need to be dug up and completely relaid.

That also means there's a subtle difference between a track that has had lengthy and repeated attention from the heavy roller and then copped a bit of moisture on the top and one that has been sitting under the covers for three or four days, which is what happened in and around a certain Primary School State Carnival in 1992.

Coming off a proper preparation the deck will be lively early on and flatten out. An underprepared track, on the other hand, will give the early life and then die, giving you the slow and low that brought our opponents in that 1992 final unstuck after they won the toss and sent us in on a pitch that had much the same consistency as plasticene.

It had been under covers for four days, and only had half an hour's rolling on two mornings before we played on it.

So you don't just take a glance at the WACA wicket, notice the resemblance to The Incredible Hulk, select the four quicks and insert the opposition if you win the toss.

The grass is there to hold the track together, and given the likely weather conditions in Perth today and tomorrow you'd expect the track won't get its final shave until the last possible moment, which will, in turn, translate into an old style green-top, right?

Well, maybe, but not quite. You can click over to Cricinfo to get to that side bar, but the guts of it is they're using a new type of grass with a high fibre content in the finer than normal leaves so it holds its colour longer but won't seam as much as you'd expect, which is presumably why we're hanging off until the last shave of the surface to decide on the twelfth man.

The sun was drying out the track yesterday, so there was still a five o'clock shadow of grass on the wicket to protect it from a blistering sun overnight that'll presumably be getting close attention this morning. Grass on the pitch might help the quicks as far as sideways movement is concerned but if the track bakes and the grass dies off it may crack, with variable bounce entering the equation.

And Michael Clark's definitely not ruling the spinner out of the equation either, particularly with the Fremantle Doctor coming into play.

Apart from that, we've got the predictable stuff about sledging (by players and spectators). One notes the comment therein that While Pup generally steers well clear of anything that might be interpreted as "sledging", he's quite happy for his 'keeper to indulge in a bit of byplay.

Sort of like my remarks about Mr Tendulkar in yesterday's blog. He doesn't either, but he was very quick to jump to the Turbanator's aid when Monkeygate broke…