Like a pair of inquisitive sleuths on a crime scene, Brendon McCullum and Jonny Bairstow squeezed through the ropes strung around the 22-yard strip and devoted the next 20 minutes deducing its nature. The duo bent, kneeled and craned their necks, probing the surface from every possible angle. Joe Root and Ollie Pope, too, joined them in their forensic examination, even as the two national curators and the local counterpart watched bemusedly from their pitch-side perch. What intrigued the Englishmen, Pope would confess later, was the two-faced appearance of the surface. One half of the pitch, when viewed vertically, is smattered with spots of dry grass; the other half is bald and brown, with “platey” cracks.“The top layer looked crusty. The cracks in the wicket aren’t just cracks, there are separate bits of ground that could open up with a lot of sun on them. The ball could deviate more off them if they open up like we expect them to,” he would detail his assessment of the surface. None of the decks in this …