Adelaide Oval curator backs spin as hot-weather forecast gives captains Patrick Cummins and Ben Stokes a difficult choice in third Test

“The players shouldn’t notice it really, but it’s just adding a little bit there because we don’t know what the weather will do with the pitch. It could be fine, it might really dry it out and it might turn big, or it might end up flattening out also.”

Either way the captains choose, the pitch will certainly not be as much of a batting paradise as the surface prepared for the last red-ball Ashes Test played here in 2013-14, when, as Hough observed, it was largely through the hot pace of Mitchell Johnson that the game did not peter into a boring draw.

“That was super flat, that was really flat,” Hough said.

“That was our first ever Test on a drop-in, really flat, and if you didn’t have Mitchell Johnson, that might’ve been a draw, so he saved our [week]. He bowled unbelievably well.

“Back then we were trying to get the old type of pitch where it would break up and stay low on days four and five. The drop-ins don’t deteriorate like the old square used to. So since 2015 we’ve left more grass, and we’ve felt there’s been a much better contest for us.”

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With CA needing a bumper Ashes summer to help bring the governing body’s budget back into surplus for the first time since 2019, Hough denied he had been pressured to produce a pitch that would take the game into day five.

“There’s always pressure, doesn’t matter what year it is,” he said. “It’s part of your role, you’ve got to step up and deliver. We don’t think ‘it needs to go for five days’, we think about a good contest between bat and ball.

“If we can get 10 wickets and 300 runs a day and it goes late into day four … [there’s] definitely no pressure from CA or SACA around it needs to last five days.”