There’s a tinge of green on it, but that’s not unusual for a Rajkot pitch. There was grass on the surface in 2016 too, when India and England began a Test series here, and it displeased Virat Kohli – not because it spiced things up for the fast bowlers (it didn’t), but because it held the pitch together too well for his spinners to come into the game.

That match was drawn, but England could have won it, potentially, had they been a little less conservative. They declared midway through the second session of day five, setting India a target of 310, leaving themselves just enough time to pick up six wickets and dwell on what-ifs.

The pitch for the 2024 Rajkot Test will remind England of Rajkot 2016, but it might also remind them of a far more recent game: Rawalpindi 2022.

Rawalpindi 2022 was flat, much like Rajkot 2016, but England 2022 were an entirely different team to England 2016. They were now the sort of team that could plunder 921 runs over two innings while going at well over a run a ball. They scored that many runs but only batted for 136.5 overs. A Test match uninterrupted by weather is expected to go on for 450 overs, so do the math. The math of Bazball left England’s bowlers just enough time, on one of the flattest pitches in history, to complete an era-defining win on the fifth evening in the dying light.

Rajkot 2024, then, could be like Rajkot 2016, if the look of the pitch is anything to go by, and that could worry India, considering England’s potential for pulling off a Rawalpindi 2022.

It’ll certainly worry India from a bowling standpoint. Even though their attack is far superior in terms of both quality and experience to Pakistan’s in Rawalpindi, it’s shown itself to still be getting to grips with the challenge of Bazball. Jasprit Bumrah has been otherworldly, but the spinners are yet to come into their own in this series; they start this third Test with a worse collective average than England’s spinners.

R Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja aren’t new to suffering early setbacks in long series, and they’ve come back to reassert their dominance on each previous occasion. They did so in 2016 too, when they bowled India to a 4-0 series win after taking a combined 6 for 363 in that Rajkot draw.

You’d bet on them doing it again, because they’re that good, but it won’t be easy. Ashwin is 37 now, and Jadeja 35. Jadeja is coming back from a hamstring injury. They’re about to bowl to this England line-up on a pitch that’s likely to be full of runs.

“The wicket is usually flat, it’s hard,” Jadeja said on the eve of the Test match. “But it depends on how it has been prepared. Sometimes you get 37 wickets in three matches – it can also be like that. But looking at this wicket, it looks good, it’s hard. But every match you play here, the wicket behaves differently. Sometimes it’s very flat, sometimes it turns, sometimes it plays well on the first two days and then starts to turn and keep low. I think this wicket will play well initially and slowly break and start turning. That’s what I think.”

There’s a case to be made that Bazball’s impact on this series has been a little overstated. England have made totals of 246, 420, 253 and 292, and could be 2-0 down were it not for a once-in-a-lifetime innings from Ollie Pope. The series, however, is 1-1, and nothing amplifies Bazball’s threat like the prospect of a flat surface.

On Wednesday, Jadeja spent at least half of his press conference fielding questions on England’s batting approach and how that affects his work as a spinner.

“In Test cricket, I feel it’s better for you the more you keep things simple,” he said, in reply to one of them. “They try to hit shots everywhere, their batsmen, and if you keep things simple and ask them to try more things, you have a chance to be successful as a bowler. If you react to their batting style and start bowling here and there, you’ll end up leaking more runs and you won’t get wickets either. I feel you should keep it simple and let them do what they want. If you stick to your line and length and your gameplan, you have more chance of success.”

This is a simple, self-evident truth as a bowler. A good, consistent line and length is likelier to get you wickets and keep the runs down, no matter what the batting team is trying to do. But if a batting team is taking chances and those chances are coming off over any length of time, it can be hard to translate that knowledge into action even if you’re as skillful and experienced as Jadeja. Even if you’re steadfast with your lines and lengths, you’ll need to push fielders back at some point to protect the boundary, and this in turn means the strike rotates more frequently, increasing the likelihood that your rhythm will suffer.

The flatter the surface, the greater the likelihood of this vicious cycle playing out.

There is, of course, another side to this, which is that England’s callow spin attack will have to bowl on the same surface. They will, however, be bowling at one of the least experienced India line-ups in recent memory, one that’s likely to feature, in Rajat Patidar and Sarfaraz Khan, a No. 4 and a No. 5 with one previous Test cap between them, and, in Dhruv Jurel, potentially another debutant behind the stumps.

In both Hyderabad and Visakhapatnam, India’s batters may have shown a certain lack of ruthlessness, failing to shut England out of contests when they had the chance to do so. The consequences of doing this in Rajkot might be severe, if the pitch turns out to be the sort of flat subcontinental surface where 500 isn’t a safe first-innings total.

Jadeja played down the inexperience of Patidar and Sarfaraz, pointing to their sizeable body of work in red-ball cricket – between them, they have 26 hundreds in 101 first-class games – and the fact that they’ve had to wait a long time behind the successful, long-serving middle order of Cheteshwar Pujara, Virat Kohli and Ajinkya Rahane.

“The new players who have come in, they have played a lot of first-class cricket,” Jadeja said. “It’s not like they’ve played one season and come straight to the Test team. They are seasoned first-class players who know how to play long innings, and what happens in Test cricket. And this [transition] time is bound to come, whether it’s now or in two years or five years.

“It’s good that they’re getting a chance in their Indian home conditions, and they’ll get set in the Test team in a short time. If they make their debut in Australia or South Africa, they may not have the confidence that they’ll be able to perform. This is the ideal place for them, here in India, they’ve played a lot of cricket on these wickets, they have a good idea of what will happen on these wickets, what won’t happen. I feel it’s a good time for them to play well in this series and utilise this opportunity well.”

They’ll hope they can, because the stage could be hostile – a high-scoring surface perfectly suited to Bazball’s rhythms – and the stakes immense.