It’s no fluke to see Dukes making a big Test impact
THE head of Dukes has called for an independent international assessment of the best cricket ball to preserve the Test game’s longterm future.
The pink Kookaburra ball has come under intense scrutiny in Adelaide this week and has generally stood up to it, playing an important role in a Test that has attracted the biggest crowds to the Adelaide Oval since the Bodyline series of 1932/33.
England won that Test match by 338 runs and it’s fair to say that a Test played under floodlights with a pink ball would have been as shocking to the MCC as the relentless barrage of bouncers was to a disbelieving Australian public all those years ago.
The success of the day-night format in this series – and the potential for a day-night Ashes Test in England in 2019 – means that the battle to provide the balls for these marquee matches is likely to get increasingly heated.
The pink Dukes was used in England last summer as Joe Root’s side hammered the West Indies in largely inhospitable weather at Edgbaston.
But with Dukes making increasing encroachments into the Australian market, it’s not inconceivable that the company’s pink ball, which was also used for the first ever full round of floodlit County Championship matches last summer, will also get an outing Down Under in the not too distant future.
That’s the ultimate aim of Dilip Jajodia, the managing director of Dukes, who believes that his company’s ball is more conducive to producing the kind of cricket that gets punters through the gate.
“I think there has to be an independent assessment of what is good for cricket,” he told TCP. “The commentators chat on about the ball not going off the bat or moving off the straight but they’re not looking into why. That’s what needs a debate.
“The only way to do it, really, is by doing what they did last year when they played one game with a Kookaburra and one game with a Dukes in the Second XI Championship and then looked at them before they made the decision to go with the Dukes for the Test match. It needs that experiment, with actual physical evidence before they make a decision. It shouldn’t be that difficult to do. It really needs that sort of thing to take place.”
Dukes have made inroads into markets in which Kookaburra have traditionally enjoyed a monopoly, like this year’s first class domestic competition in Pakistan.
“It has brought the scoring rates down and the runs per wicket down because they again had the problem of the batsmen dominating and the bowlers getting nothing,” he added.