Michael Vaughan Ignore moans, Kookaburra is what county game needs
Experiment has exposed how hard transition to Test cricket can be and needs extending for benefit of England team
The Kookaburra ball has led to big scores and an entire round of draws in the County Championship, but I have liked the experiment and would welcome seeing it rolled out further.
I have long advocated trialling the Kookaburra and now I think it would be ideal if we used the ball in half of championship matches and introduced it in the pathway programmes too, so young players in second-team cricket learn how to bowl with it before they reach the first XI. That way, you are teaching young bowlers before they become professional cricketers how hard it is to bowl at the top level and that it is worth bowling a bit quicker.
There is swing and seam at Test level and the odd iffy pitch, so it would be wrong to use the Kookaburra all the time. Plus, you would need much bigger squads, because seamers would snap in half having to bowl so many overs with it. The challenge of facing a seaming and swinging Dukes ball, knowing which deliveries to leave and play, is important as well, so mixing and matching the two is the right way to go.
I understand the seamers being grumpy and lambasting the Kookaburra, but what it has exposed to a few in the county game is that international cricket is hard – especially overseas. If you really want to play for England and be like James Anderson and Stuart
Broad, then you have to upskill if you bowl at 80-82mph. If you want success at the top, you either bowl with pace or you rag it if you are a spinner. Simple. You cannot just rely on bowling a hard length and letting the ball and conditions do the rest of the work for you. Using the Dukes ball in 2023, the bowling average for fast bowlers across the first two rounds of the County Championship was 30.3; this year it is 44. Likewise, the strike rate has gone from 52.3 to 73.3. Seamers are having to work for wickets.
It has also been great to see spinners have a chance to influence games in April. Only 11 per cent of overs were bowled by spinners in the first two rounds of the championship last year. This season, it is 43 per cent. They bowled long spells and the top wicket-takers in both divisions are spinners (Cameron Steel for Surrey in Division One and Alex Thomson for Derbyshire in Division Two).
It has also proved we have some very good batsmen in our game. There have been 39 centuries, including five doubles and a triple. Joe Clarke has scored two hundreds and is a good player, one of those who struggles against the Dukes but plays well in the kind of flatter conditions you see in Test cricket. County cricket primarily exists for the fans and members but it still has to produce Test cricketers, and this will help.
Ollie Price batted 80 overs to save the game for Gloucestershire against Yorkshire, which was a great effort and shows his promise. Top-quality players such as Alex Davies at Warwickshire and Jordan Cox at Essex shone through in the last round. Surrey had a good go at chasing down more than 200 on day four against Somerset. It has been a different style of cricket and I know some have found it a hard watch at times, but I am sure we would have had a couple of results had the weather not intervened.
In fact, the type of cricket has been reminiscent of Test cricket in Australia: the new ball doing a bit but then it flattening out. I have watched a lot of county cricket on the online streams over the past two weeks and it has been a good product. Games have lasted four days and that normally happens at this time of year only if it rains. The lowest total in the last round was 198. A year ago, that probably won you a game or was a middling score.
It has not been a case of win the toss, win the game. Over the past few years, an individual has won the game for a team with 65 off 80 balls. That is no good for Test cricket. What I have seen over the past couple of weeks is batsmen batting a long time and training their brains to do it at the highest level, which is what English cricket needs.
One thing that has surprised me is that not many teams played Bazball. When I think back to last year, Nottinghamshire, for example, set up a game or two with bold declarations. With conditions as they have been, I wanted to see more positive declarations and opportunities to set games up on the last day. But teams now get eight points rather than five for a draw, so the motivation is not there.
It is at odds with how England play. I can imagine Ben Stokes and Brendon Mccullum scratching their heads at nine draws, but they will be pleased that bowlers are learning they need pace to compete at the top and batsmen to play long innings and be ruthless when they get in, rather than worrying about a ball being out there with their name on it.