India legend Sunil Gavaskar has questioned the double standards applied to discussions around Test conditions in Australia and India as the SCG Test looks set to wrap up within three days.

Twenty-six wickets have fallen across the first two days of the fifth, final and deciding game of the Border-Gavaskar series, with the match every chance of finishing two days early.

After the MCG Test came down to the final hour of day five, the Sydney deck has seen teams dismissed for 185 and 181, with India 6-141 in its second innings after day two.

Only two batters, debutant Beau Webster and the wildly slogging Rishabh Pant, have passed 50.

In the final session on Saturday, Gavaskar admitted the green seaming pitch had delivered an “interesting Test match”, but questioned if it was the best to have a Test failing to reach day four.

“When I saw the pitch I did say the cows could have gone and grazed on it,” he said on ABC Sport.

“This is not the ideal Test match pitch that you want because you want it to go into a fourth or the fifth day. Unless there is rain I don’t see us being here on day four.”

Nine Australian and six Indian batters were dismissed on day two at an average of 20 runs per wicket, something that Gavaskar believes would spark condemnation from the cricketing world if it happened on a rank turner in India.

“All hell would have broken loose. There would have been all kinds of innuendos, all sorts of comments about ‘Is this a good pitch?'” he said.

“Even former players who played on this pitch before were so surprised. We had Glenn McGrath saying he’d never seen that much grass on the pitch.

“The point is, when you go overseas you have to be prepared to play on the surface.”

He singled out former players from England and Australia for bemoaning tough pitches in the subcontinent but not reserving the same energy when teams were skittled by pace on their own shores.

“Over the years have you ever heard a former Indian cricketer complain about conditions? They accept that’s what playing overseas is all about,” Gavaskar said.

“But 15 wickets in a day in India, man, there would be hell.”

After a chaotic, 14-wicket opening day of a Test led to widespread criticism of a pitch in Indore in 2023, former India Test player Aakash Chopra pointed out there was “a marked difference” between the sort of greentops like the Gabba surface that led to a two-day Test between Australia and South Africa in 2022 and a dustbowl deck.

“When you see a greentop, which has a lot of moisture in it, eventually it actually becomes a decent surface to bat on and maybe, at some stage, the spinners also come into the picture,” Chopra told ESPN Cricinfo at the time.

“But, when you start a game where the puff of dust [on the pitch] is there from ball one … it just keeps deteriorating. There is no way that [spinning] pitch is going to get better as the match progresses.

“Nobody should be asking for a surface which is so conducive to spin from ball one, because then you’re doing a disservice to the game of cricket.”