One of the talking points of the ongoing India vs England Test series has been about Dukes balls. Compared to different balls that are used across the world for Test cricket, there was a time when it was the Dukes ball that bowlers loved the most. While Kookaburra and SG balls used in Australia and India would lose their seam quicker than the Dukes ball, which hampered the bowlers from extracting swing and seam movement for longer.
However, all this was a thing of the past in recent years, but that has not been the case. The Dukes balls have not been swinging as long as they used to, and more importantly, they are getting out of shape, due to which balls have to be changed regularly. While Shubman Gill pointed out the issue after the Edgbaston Test. During the Lord’s Test, matters only got worse as the ball was under a microscopic lens and had to be changed multiple times, and was also inspected on numerous occasions by the umpires to see if it was in the right shape.
Former England skipper Alastair Cook, though, saw things differently and took a jibe at the bowlers and said they are always moaning. “I just love how bowlers are always moaning. It’s like they bowl a bad ball and it’s never their fault. They’ve scraped the footmark… If they bowl a bad ball, they look at the ball and blame the shape,” Cook said on BBC Sport. “I think a batsman would much rather hit some slightly harder ball. Nothing worse than playing a lovely cover drive like I used to, and it going nowhere,” he added.
Despite the various perceptions on balls, Dukes ball owner Dilip Jagjodia was adamant that they stick to British standards, speaking to The Indian Express earlier. “If I made a really hard ball, it would have broken bats. That’s the problem; we have to be careful. If people are adventurous players, they might be tempted to do it. That would be disastrous. The laws of the game are that the ball has to deteriorate over 80 overs. So the ball has to play 80 overs, and it gradually gets worse. You can’t suddenly come after 20 overs and say, This ball is not doing what I want or what it does. If there is something genuinely wrong, then it has the option to change it,” he said.
