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Dusty-Medium-Day 2-Fast Deterioration-Bowling first
Started with Ashwin and Jadeja. Reduced Aus to 20-5 in about 15 overs with Ash and Jaddu bowling 8 each on the trot. Then I brought on Shami and Kuldeep. Carey and Marsh did a solid rear-guard partnership. There were close calls and edges flying wide off the slips but that is expected for this kind of condition. Brought on Kuldeep and Jaddu after lunch. But now since both the batsmen were all set they played sweeps and came down the track to the spinners with Marsh bringing up his 50 with a Six down the ground. Eventually Marsh nicked a cut to Pant and Carey chased a wide full ball only to nick it to Rohit at 2nd slip. Tail enders folded cheaply. Overall, the feeling was right for spinners bowling a dusty pitch. When the ball was new wickets came in clusters while once the ball got old, it took decent effort to pick wickets.
View attachment 298691
Standard-Medium-Day 2-Fast Deterioration-Bowling First
Started with Bumrah and Shami and then changed Bumrah with Jadeja around 7th over. Smith was quite aggressive against Jaddu, repeatedly coming down and pulling when I went short or back of a good length. Wicket taking was tough but then I built up pressure by setting in-out fields and sticking to a good line, one side of the wicket. Smith was bowled trying to dance down the wickets. Since then Aus went a bit defensive and I picked up couple more with.
But it was nowhere easy as it was bowling on a Dusty pitch. At one point of time there was a boundary almost every over as I had fielders all around the bat expecting AI to gift me wickets as they did before this patch. All I had to do was just set Ultra-Aggressive fields and just put the ball there for getting a 5-fer. Now it feels like I am bowling on a flat pitch with little assistance for the bowlers.
So 2 ODIs and 2 partial Tests where there is definite improvement of AI when it comes to playing spinners. There was marked effect of the pitch on the way the AI played. Spinner’s effectiveness was also affected by the pitch conditions.
Now, BA didn’t say anything about gameplay fixes. So, how could this be happening? Well, one theory could be that since they’re notorious for breaking things with every patch, this might be a case for something that they unknowingly did which ‘fixed’ the AI’s woes against spin? OR, they are intentionally fixed this but for some reason they forgot to mention it in patch notes?
Anyway, the sample size is still quite small so more testing is needed. But at lest for me, I can definitely say AI is playing spin with more authority and I need to actually put effort in my bowling to get wickets. In ODI’s you have to set fields properly else get ready to get tonked all around the park. Let’s see how this holds up with more games.
To put things in perspective, I stopped playing ODI's and Tests all together because of spinners running through AI even with Rev and Drift set to 10. I didn't change Bounce and Flight values since spinners became darters almost. So AI will put up 100 odd for 3 in 20 overs in an ODI and get bowled out for 220 odd as spinners destroyed them in the middle overs. In tests, once again almost in very condition the spinners will pick up a 5-fer without much effort while it will be next to impossible to dismiss the AI in 4th innings.
Only settings I have changed is that both Spin Rev and Drift is set to 25, rest all are at default values.
