Marrara Stadium in Darwin will host its first Test match in 22 years and head curator Jake Pavlich is rightly proud of the drop-in split-pitch Australia and Bangladesh will play on. Pavlich, also Northern Territory Cricket’s head of facilities, said he hoped his pitch was “nice and consistent with runs in it, and bowlers can work hard and get something out of it”. The curator said he’d been given no direction on preparing a certain kind of surface despite the fact last year’s Ashes series featured two two-days Tests - which cost Cricket Australia multi-million dollar revenue losses.