Happy?

Well, it was a crap pitch, officially. The match referee judged it as poor, which may incur a $20,000 fine for the Indian board and a trip to Coventry for Pune. And no, just because the referee was Chris Broad does not mean that this was yet more in his family's long tradition of taunts, slights and provocations of Australia: you won, but really, it wasn't a proper Test match.

But was it such a crap pitch?

To look at, yes, but there's more than meets the eye here. The Test match lasted almost three days. Plenty of recent Test matches were shorter in terms of overs bowled. There were at least two last year. One was at Headingley, where England beat Sri Lanka on a pitch some thought would not have passed formal muster if it was for a county game. The other was (mumbling again) in Hobart, where (mumble, mumble) South Africa crushed Australia. But we don't talk about that.

The year before, mutter, mutter, mutter, there was Trent Bridge. Talk about not proper Test matches. No one wanted to play on that pitch, if it meant batting first on it. But Australia had to, and you know the rest, and since therapy hopefully have learnt to cope with it. That match lasted 80 fewer overs than Pune, a full ball's worth. For that matter, the preceding Test at swinging, seaming, swaying Edgbaston was also done in fewer overs than Pune.

Arguably, those all were crap pitches, but they were crap English and Australian pitches, and so they don't count. Pune was a crap Indian pitch.

Think I'm talking crap?

From Cricinfo, we learn that since pitch monitoring became a formal thing in 2006, seven pitches have been reported as unfit or worse. Four were in India, three because of excessive spin from the start, one because it was simply unplayable. No pitch has been reported as poor because of excessive seam movement, though this is one of the criteria to be considered. But two were judged to be poor because they were too flat, including – perversely – Trent Bridge, the year before (picking that scab again, sorry) Australia's Ashes turned to dust there.

But within these stats, there is more intrigue. Of the four pitches damned for their surfeit of spin, two were for matches against Australia – and Australia won them both, against Sri Lanka in Galle in 2011, and now against India in Pune.

Evidently, these were such crap pitches that they were crap even for the crappers.

Pitch preparation is a fine and finicky and sometimes sinister business, but there has to be limits, and there are, and they are exhaustive and exacting about what is acceptable in terms of seam, spin, bounce, carry, deterioration and danger, pages of them. If Broad wasn't in a bad mood about the pitch at the end of the Test, he would have been by the time he finished the paperwork.

But the rules are preceded, in capital letters, by an injunction that "ALL PITCHES WILL BE JUDGED SOLELY ON HOW THEY PLAY", with addenda about balanced contest between bat and ball, allowing all the skills to be displayed, etc.

So how did "poor" Pune compare with, say, passable Trent Bridge? "Balanced contest"? Both matches were dominated by bowlers, but in each, the best batsman in the world found a way to make a hundred. "All the individual skills"? In Pune, much was made of the fact that spinners opened the bowling for both sides, and seamers were marginalised. But seamers did bowl 59 overs, and take nine wickets. At Trent Bridge, spinners bowled a total of 16 overs, for not one wicket.

Danger? Getting out always hurts, but Trent Bridge was more dangerous to health and wellbeing by far.

Not assessed by the ICC, but important surely: was it entertaining? To us, Pune was. So, in a macabre way, was (ahem) Trent Bridge. We can admit that now.

The fact is that Australia expected spinning pitches in India, because that was all anyone talked about beforehand, and what they trained for in Dubai, and if Pune spun more and sooner and more erratically even than India anticipated, at least Australia was ready with a well-formulated and executed policy about playing as if every ball was straight or coming in, and it worked. A crap spinning pitch allows you to do that. A crap seaming, swinging pitch simply doesn't give you the time and therefore luxury to make the adjustment.

Pune was far from a model pitch, and nothing like it will be seen again in the series. But crap?

(No need to mumble now) Scoreboard!