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All balls!! (2000)

Ted Dexter Copy for the Cricketer Magasine
Monday 4th September 2000

I like listening to Angus Fraser on the radio. He is an agreeable man with a dry wit and his attitude to the game seems to have preserved a freshness which long service in county cricket sometimes dulls.

It was intriguing to hear him debating the cricket ball issue, especially the notion that all Test cricket should be played with a standard product. Apparently David Lloyd had suggested the machine stitched Kookaburra as the answer with less prominent stitching. This could mean more emphasis on swinging the new ball and a need for spinners if the “old” ball was no help to the “seamers”.

Angus felt that since batsmen were free to take their pick of the world's best bats, bowlers should have the same opportunity to pick the ball they like best. It is entirely logical and I tend to agree. Where he slipped up was saying that bat technology had progressed while the ball was still the same. Wrong!

Cricket balls are definitely not the same. The main difference is that the core of the ball has changed significantly, from strips of cork bound in layer by layer with twine, to a composite lump of cork and latex which constitutes two thirds or more of the overall sphere. The change was made largely in the cause of uniformity from the administrators point of view and was embraced by manufacturers because the process was less labour intensive.

I heard umpires Shepherd and Harper saying that the balls had lasted well in the recent Test series – not surprising when some of the innings have been rather short – but one reason must be that the core of the modern ball remains unchanged for the whole 80 overs, before a new one becomes due. It is self evident that the ball therefore remains harder for longer and gives the faster bowlers a lot more chance of success with the old ball. More broken fingers is another result.

It may even be that the “discovery” of reverse swing was due to this basic change.The cork and twine ball became too soft for the quick men to bother after 30 overs, so the opportunity to experiment with rough sides, smooth sides, wet sides and dry sides and different seam positions barely came along.

Going back to the bowlers’ free choice argument, they are lucky that the authorities have the need to maintain competition between manufacturers to keep the price down. They stipulate as closely as they can what the ball should be like and then test them to ensure that they conform to a standard. But there will always be variations and bowlers will always find the one that feels smallest in the hand and gives the most chance of swing and seam.

All that is fine until five day matches are reduced to two with thousands of dissappointed spectators. Repayment of hundreds of thousands of pounds for unused tickets is something the game can ill afford so it would be simply bad business not to look hard at the ball and the pitches to ensure as far as possible the right balance between bat and ball.

It is just as well that the Oval Test lasted into the fifth day and it was a delight that the West Indians included the leg-spinner Nagamootoo. Without him they would have hardly fared as well as they did because he broke up the key Engand partnerships in both innings, Trescothick in the first and Stewart in the second. Such a long, thrilling match will at least keep the arguments for change of ball or different pitch construction in perspective.

The series overall confirmed some of the eternal truths of Test cricket. That the outcome is usually determined by the best bowling attack and at long last England were able to put three experienced men together, Gough, Caddick and Cork with three hundred or so Test wickets between them. Often enough in recent years we have gone in with raw talent alone and you only have to see what happened to the promising Reon King to know that is not enough. When Craig White suddenly joined the party with a vengeance, there was no doubt where the advantage lay. Obviously Walsh and Ambrose would have been first pick for either side from the start but the support bowling was not enough to sustain the pressure they created.

It was definitely not a series for fancy stroke making, Lara excepted, with major contributions made by Atherton and Vaughan for England, Adams and Sarwan for West Indies, all of them prepared to defend correctly and wait for the scoring opportunities. It was gritty stuff for most of the time but never dull, all culminating in the full house thiller on the fifth day at the Oval.

A final word for Simon Hughes who made a spirited response to my comments two months ago about bowlers and their views on batting techniques.Simon's gentle barb in my direction was that he took time to accept my view of his bowling “because I was a batsman”.

Sorry to do this to you Simon, but the 1969 Playfair career records section tells me that Dexter.E.R took 419 first class wickets at an average of 29.9 – 5 wickets 9 times, 10 wickets twice.

The 1994 edition reveals that Hughes.S.P took 466 wickets at 32.48 – 5 wickets 10 times and 50 wickets in a season twice. I went back to 1969 to check my own season by season tallies to find that the criteria for a mention in the final column used to be 100 wickets, not 50. I did not get a mention.

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