Stuart Broad Talking Balls

The Cricketer Nick Howson | 09/05/2019 at 16:00

Stuart Broad insists this summer's Ashes will not descend into a bowl-off between England and Australia despite the decision to use the old Dukes ball for the series.

The ECB have confirmed the ball which was used to devastating effect in 2017 and 2018 will return this summer, despite being withdrawn for this season's County Championship.

A tighter-seamed cherry has been used for domestic games this season but batsmen have cashed in with some huge scores.

James Anderson averages 16.06 with the old specification and though Australia can call upon Pat Cummins and Mitchell Starc this summer the decision is expected to benefit the hosts, who are hoping to win back the urn.

But Broad said: "Test cricket in this country has been exhilarating, fun, enjoyable over the last couple of years. 

"Do we need to step into the unknown in August and September with a different ball? Probably not.

"I don't set it as a pro-England decision because Australia have got Pat Cummins, Mitchell Starc, James Pattinson and [Peter] Siddle. It is a decision that is made on what is best for Test cricket in England.

"You can only go off the last couple of years of Test cricket here and batsman who have played well have scored runs.

"I've always thought that the longer format of the game 320 plays 300 is exciting cricket. I've never seen a good Test match of 500 plays 500.

"I think you need movement in the ball to make it exciting."

Not involved in England's World Cup plans, the Nottinghamshire seamer has over two months to prepare for the five-match series which starts at Edgbaston on August 1.

Yet his place could come under threat if Jofra Archer continues on his current trajectory which has seen him linked with a Test call-up just three games into his England career.

The Sussex seamer has already impressed with his effortless pace and variation, and captain Joe Root admits he is already under consideration.

Broad, a veteran of 437 Test victims, is unperturbed however and welcomes the emergence of the West Indies native.

"I am not threatened at all," the 32-year-old added. "He is untested at the top level but that is because he has not played a lot of it. 

"As an England supporter you want them to win every trophy available this summer.

"If we think he gives the team a better option of doing that then it is awesome to see him come onto the scene.

"Can I see him playing in the Ashes? Absolutely. You're never going to go through a series with the same three fast bowlers because injuries happen and rotation needs to occur."

Ball manufacturers continue their pitch battle.
Jon Pierik.

Melbourne Age.

Friday, 22 February 2019.
PTG 2735-13668.

The battle over which cricket ball should be used in Australia has gained momentum, with the head of the English ‘Dukes' ball company in Melbourne fronting Cricket Australia (CA), while his dominant rival pointed to more competitive matches using the local ‘Kookaburra’ brand. As the Sheffield Shield season resumes on Saturday using the ‘Dukes' ball, managing director Dilip Jajodia has been busy spreading the word at international, domestic and club level in Australia, even appearing at a lunch with the Victorian Sub-District Cricket Association on Thursday.

This is the third summer the ‘Dukes' ball, with its more pronounced seam and greater lacquer than the ‘Kookaburra', will be used in the second half of the Shield season. It was introduced with a view to helping batsmen and bowlers prepare for an Ashes series, where the ‘Duke' is used, but also as a way for CA to generate market tension, introduced at a time when the standard of the ‘Kookaburra' had been questioned amid player and umpire frustration over ball changes during Tests.

CA said on Thursday it had yet to make a call on whether the ‘Dukes' experiment would continue after this year's Ashes series but Jajodia claimed it was in the best interests of the sport to do so. "If they [CA] did any investigation, I think they would find the vast majority would want to continue on as they are”, Jajodia said. "The answer I got was that there have been no issues, apart from [former Australian player Peter Siddle recently] (PTG 2731-13649, 18 February 2019), I followed all the PR that came out and it was all positive” .

While no longer a player, former Australian spinner Shane Warne has called for the hand-stitched ‘Dukes' to replace the locally-made ‘Kookaburra' in Tests and one-day cricket in Australia, the ball having also been embraced by the West Indies Cricket Board. "Why not, if it's the best ball”, Jajodia said. "I know we have history, it's the Aussies versus the Poms, and all that [but] it's a small global village. I can deliver balls in three days ... we have to start thinking a little bit more globally”, he said.

"Consumers are very demanding and the consumers are not only the individual people that pay for the balls but are also the people that watch the game. If a Test match in Australia is a better game because of the ball they are using, then that is bending to the consumer's wishes. I think you would probably find that there are people who run cricket here who think it is an advantage to use the local ball to the disadvantage of the incoming team. But equally they bought the ‘Dukes' ball to prepare for when they go to England ... beyond all of that, what is the key ingredient [to a good game]? A good pitch and a ball that is supposed to do what cricket wants it to do”.

There have been claims the ‘Dukes' ball provided more competitive matches but ‘Kookaburra' statistics show the runs per wicket average and percentage of scores below 250 were lower in the six Shield matches before Christmas this season using a ‘Kookaburra' ball than they were in the second half of last season using a ‘Duke'. The runs per wicket in Tests in Australia this austral summer (29.81) dropped to a seven-year low which, apart from batsman error, ‘Kookaburra' says can be attributable to bowlers benefiting from a new leather treating process making the ball more resilient, and a slight improvement in the lining of the leather and general ball strength.

The average runs per wicket when using a ‘Kookaburra' ball in Test cricket had been eight runs higher in Australia than in other countries between 2015-16 until the start of this summer but the ball manufacturer believes this was more to do with friendly batting conditions locally rather than the ball failing to provide swing or losing its hardness.

‘Kookaburra' maintains a tight grip on the supply of balls to all levels of cricket in Australia but ‘Dukes' has growing support. ‘Dukes' supplied the balls at the 1999 World Cup in England and continues to question the International Cricket Council as to why it has not had the chance to do so again since. The ‘Kookaburra' will be used at this year's showpiece event in England.

Jajodia has met with CA chief Kevin Roberts and operations boss Peter Roach during his current trip. ‘Kookaburra' has a suppliers contract with CA but this is not an exclusive deal. Its not the first time Jajodia has visited Australiasia to push his product (PTG 1842-9225, 2 June 2016), or made it clear that he intends to open up the cricket ball market in Australia, having pitch to clubs and schools as well as the professional level earlier this decade (PTG 1265-6101, 7 January 2014). There have also been a number of public exchanges of views between the two manufacturers about the merits of their respective products over the last few years (PTG 2227-11283, 11 August 2017)

18/06/18

Jake Ball has extended his Nottinghamshire contract until the end of the 2021 season.

15/06/18

Nottinghamshire will use a Kookaburra pink ball, rather than a Dukes, for their Specsavers County Championship Division One floodlit match with Worcestershire, which starts on Monday 25 June. This will be the case for all Division One Day/night games in 2018 whereas for a comparison, Division Two will continue with the Duke balls as in 2017.

Despite taking 8/73 bowler remains a pink ball sceptic.

James Buckley.

Fairfax Media.

Monday, 30 October 2017.

PTG 2293-11592.

Australian bowler Mitchell Starc remains a strong critic of the pink ball, despite it delivering him with a career-best 8-73 in New South Wales' Sheffield Shield match against South Australia in Adelaide on the weekend.  But for all his success with the non-traditional coloured ball, Starc is still adamant it behaves differently to its original red counterpart when it comes to swing and firmness.  Asked if he'd changed his opinion on the pink ball, Starc answered with a mono-syllabic "no" before expanding when queried on the reverse swing he produced against South Australia.  

After providing too much grass on the pitch for the inaugural day-night Test in 2015 in order to protect the ball, curator Damian Houghe took a few extra millimetres off the top for last season’s follow-up involving South Africa which pushed the game into the fourth day and most were satisfied with that result.  Reports from Starc’s match suggest Hough trimmed the drop-in pitch a little shorter still.  

Starc said: “[South Australia’s] Callum Ferguson made a few comments last night about it might have been a bit more of an abrasive surface than it was, he mentioned that the grass might have been a bit shorter than it has been in the past”.  "We still found that leather came away from the quarter seam, which probably caused it to reverse a bit as well.  It still goes soft and it does make it a bit more hard work for the bowlers once it does go soft, but we found a way to get 20 wickets and it was a great result for the [NSW]”.

Despite Starc's lack of fondness for the pink ball, he'll still be required to use it in the day-night Test against England at the Adelaide Oval in early December.

What science tells us about mysteries of swing bowling.

Simon Hughes.

The Times.

Monday, 24 April 2017.

PTG 2112-10712.

Swing bowling. A phenomenon as baffling to explain as it is to negotiate. The young Yorkshire bowler Ben Coad has taken 22 wickets with it in five early-season innings for his county. This English summer, which for the first time has balls of three different colours (and two makes) in use in county matches, the issue is more complicated than ever: which balls swing the most, when, and most importantly, why? After a day spent testing balls in a wind tunnel at the University of Bath, I hope that I have the answers.

There are many myths and fallacies about swing. The wind tunnel immediately dispelled a principal one, that moist, humid air will encourage swing. It was bone dry inside the machine, yet some balls swung prodigiously. Humidity is largely irrelevant, but cloud cover is a big influence. Swing, as every bowler knows, is a very fragile art conditional on various factors. One is the stability of the air directly above the pitch, to a height of, say, three metres. The sun shining on the surface generates heat and convection currents rise disrupting that stability. That is why the ball swings considerably less on a sunny day. Cloud cover blocks the sun, preventing the ground from heating up; there is no convection and therefore the stable air is likely to be more conducive to swing.

Darkness can, of course, have the same effect. During Middlesex’s Champion County match against a Marylebone Cricket Club XI in Abu Dhabi last month, batsmen became spooked in what became known as the “twilight hour” as the pink ball dipped and swung around. Wickets fell at regular intervals. There is a whole round of day-night County Championship matches in late June as England prepare for the first-ever pink ball Test against West Indies at Edgbaston in August. Expect a glut of wickets at about sunset.

Professor Gary Lock, the head of mechanical engineering at Bath, gives lectures on the aerodynamics of a cricket ball and, under his guidance, we experimented with a variety of balls of different colours in varying states. Each ball was inserted on to a thin metal arm in the wind tunnel that was connected to a number of sensors measuring the deviations of the ball as the wind was blown towards it, simulating a ball being bowled fast through the air. The speed was regularly cranked up to 100mph.

One of the keys to swing is the slight tilting of the seam in the direction of intended movement. The ridge on the seam “trips” the air coming towards it, creating turbulence in a thin layer around the ball on the rougher side. That causes drag and the ball is pulled off its straight-line path. Keeping the other side smooth and shiny enhances this effect as the air slips past that side, known as laminar flow.

I sucked a mint and added sugary saliva to the shiny side of a ‘Dukes' ball about 40 overs old. After polishing, it swung more consistently and at higher speeds. Bowlers have been doing this for years, of course. 'Murray Mints' are best. Note to Faf du Plessis, the South Africa Test captain: just don’t do it by transferring your finger straight from mint to ball, especially when there are about 38 TV cameras watching (PTG 2010-10163, 22 December 2016).

It was noticeable that the white (and pink) ‘Kookaburra' balls swung far less than the red ‘Dukes'. This is borne out by the experience of most one-day batsmen around the globe who flay the white ball about with alacrity, much to the chagrin of their red-ball counterparts who have to handle frequent and prodigious deviation. The reason for this is explained by Dilip Jajodia, the owner of ‘Dukes'.

“Our Dukes balls are hand-stitched in Pakistan and the stitching is done forwards and backwards so that the seam is thicker and prouder compared to ‘Kookaburra' balls, which are machine-stitched in one direction only”, he says. [The seam creates a rudder on the ball that controls swing].  "Also, we add grease to the leather for red English balls to make them more water-resistant so you can achieve a better polish than on an Australian-made ‘Kookaburra' which does not have the grease added.”

‘Kookaburra' balls are still used for all International Cricket Council tournaments, which is why every country plays with the white ‘Kookaburra' in their domestic competitions, but interestingly Australia used the red ‘Dukes' for the second half of their 2016-17 Sheffield Shield season. Pink ‘Dukes' will be used for the day-night matches in England this summer.

Now we come to the complex phenomenon of reverse swing. This happens when a ball becomes scuffed and cut on a dry, cracked pitch. In such conditions teams are good at (legally) allowing the rough side of the ball to become badly damaged while still looking after the shiny side. At some point, usually at about 40 overs, the ball held for a conventional outswinger — seam tilted to the left, shiny side on the right — starts curving the opposite way if it is bowled at high pace.

Essentially this is due to the air around the very rough side becoming so turbulent that it forces the movement — swing — in the other direction. We watched this happen in the wind tunnel. An older ball scuffed up on one side swung in a conventional direction until the speed was about 75mph and then it began to reverse swing. A tennis ball with tape stuck to one side does this at almost any speed.

Professor Lock illustrated that this could happen even to a relatively new ball with a bit of appropriate doctoring — applying a few scrapes of sandpaper to one side — although again the pace has to be above 80mph. Players have experimented with sandpaper attached to the inside of their shirt cuffs for this purpose, though of course this is illegal.

So, to sum up, Dukes balls generally swing more because of the prouder seam and more-polishable leather but the seam should be tilted to 15 degrees for best results and maintained in that position as the ball flies towards the batsman. A wobbling seam will nullify swing. Both types of ball will reverse swing with the right sort of abrasions and if bowled at high speed.

An old ragged ball damaged on both sides that had been at the bottom of my bag for years moved not a jot in the wind tunnel even at 100mph. This was reassuring as I remember how consistently it had flown straight on to, and off, the middle of a succession of Somerset players’ bats. It is still really a batsman’s game.