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Want an end to ball tampering? Try improving the ball

Junior cricket needs to change. (AAP Image/Joe Castro)
Roar Guru
31st March, 2018
7

This has been a pretty dark period in cricket. There’s no need to go into it – so much has already been said – but there is one dimension to the saga that is yet to be analysed.

I’m talking about the ball, specifically the Kookaburra ball used for Test match cricket in many countries.

There was some talk in recent times about how the Sheffield Shield went to using Duke balls for the second half of the season and how the ball did move around a lot more than the Kookaburra that is normally used.

One thing I’ve noticed consistently when images are showed of the balls used in Test match cricket is that they seem to have significantly smaller seams than the Kookaburra balls used for club cricket that I’ve always played with.

Those balls that we always used would swing more often than not. Sometimes you’d get a ball that just wouldn’t, but generally if you bowled it right, you could get it to swing. Over time the ball would deteriorate and the natural swing would slowly go away, you’d have a period where the ball wouldn’t swing, and then, if you’d looked after the ball right, you might start to get it to reverse swing late in the day.

Cricket ball generic

(AAP Image/Joe Castro)

If you played on a particularly abrasive pitch, the natural swing would go sooner and the reverse would arrive sooner. If you played in conditions that looked after the ball well, it wouldn’t deteriorate enough to get reverse swing, but it would generally mean you’d keep getting natural swing throughout the day.

Compare that to the standard in Test cricket using modern Kookaburra balls. If you are lucky, you might get five to six overs of natural swing, then suddenly the game is all about trying to get the ball to reverse because until you get it to reverse you aren’t going to get it to do anything.

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There has been much talk about the ‘roads’ that we’ve seen in Australia in recent times, but could the issue just as much be the ball? If Kookaburra could just make a slightly more pronounced seam on the ball, then it would swing more and have more chance of moving off the seam also, even on the pitches we’ve seen in Australia.

Give the players a ball that will actually move off the straight without having to try everything under the sun to it to get it to do so and maybe there wouldn’t be as great a temptation to push the limits of the laws.

I’m not trying to justify the actions or Dave Warner, Steve Smith and Cameron Bancroft – or of Faf du Plessis, Vernon Philander or anyone else who’s been caught ball tampering in recent times – but we all like a more even contest between bat and ball, so give the bowlers something to work with that doesn’t require pushing the limits of what’s legal to get it and maybe we can have some better bat vs ball contests in Test cricket.

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