Pink Ball Postmortem

Elizabeth Ammon.

The Times.

Friday, 30 June 2017.

PTG 2184-11075.

The County Championship’s first ever round of pink-ball, day-night matches finished on Thursday evening. The trial was designed to help those England players involved in August's day-night Test against the West Indies and to see whether floodlit cricket could help revitalise the county game.  Although there have been improvements in the pink ball since it was last used in county cricket in a match between Kent and Glamorgan in 2011 (PTG 834-4075, 16 September 2011), this time it received mixed reviews.

The main complaint was that the ball went soft more quickly than the red ball which, on slow pitches, resulted in some passages of stultifying cricket. In terms of visibility it was generally reported as fine out of the hand and off the bat but in twilight difficult to see across the ground. Kent’s Darren Stevens received a severe blow to the head after ducking into a delivery from Nottinghamshire’s Harry Gurney and was noticeably struggling to pick up the ball under the lights.

Durham and England opening bowler Mark Wood said: “I think it was in the bowler’s favour when it was new and when it got older it became a lot more batter-friendly. It got really soft, it sounded difficult to hit off the bat and you had to really wait for a bad ball.  It reminded me a little bit of the condition it gets into on the subcontinent; really soft and a bit flakey. When it’s new it’s really hard and the seam is quite big so it allows it to move a little bit. Through the middle overs we were trying to get some lateral movement but we couldn’t really get anything. [Opposition batsman] Moeen Ali was saying he was struggling to time it because it was so soft off the pitch it wasn’t coming off the bat”.

Yorkshire seam bowler Tim Bresnan said it was "definitely harder work with the pink ball”.  "The red one always keeps you in the game because you can shine it up and swing it well into the 60th over. With the pink one as soon as it stops swinging you’re not getting it back. If they can improve the ball, make it harder for longer, that would make it more interesting, or better for the bowling unit anyway. Once the hardness wore off it felt like a one-day game in white clothes because it was like bowling with the white ball: no swing and no real seam”.

Essex spinner Simon Harmer said: “The seam is a little bit different. It didn’t spin or turn as consistently as I thought it would, which maybe played to my advantage. There was a lot of bounce with the pink ball and it comes off the bat a lot better. All the bowlers felt there was extra bounce with it. It’s going to take time to adjust”.

Middlesex batsman Paul Stirling "expected it to swing for a lot longer than it did and from what we’ve practised with and what the lads have experienced in the Abu Dhabi pink-ball games. We thought it would have done a lot more towards the end of the day as well, but it’s done less than we thought”.  

There were varying reports from specatators about visibility, some saying that they preferred the pink ball and that it seemed brighter but others reporting difficulty seeing it across the ground and in the air.  And in terms of the effect on crowd numbers?  Yorkshire reported that 500 extra people came through the gates in the evening of day one but approximately equal numbers were leaving because of the cold. Durham reported an extra 250 coming in after 5 p.m. to take advantage of their “Fiver after Five” offer.

There was a healthy crowd of more than 2,000 at Hove who mostly stayed for the duration although it was noticeably sunnier on the south coast than elsewhere. Edgbaston had just under 1,300 in the crowd on day one - about the same size as a normal championship crowd but most had left by the evening session. At Chelmsford there were 2,300 spectators on day one, 200 of whom came for the after-work session. Trent Bridge similarly reported higher than average crowd on day one getting 2,000 through the gates - 600 of whom were on free tickets.  

After the first day, which was probably boosted by novelty factor, reports indicate most crowd sizes returned to around average.