Duke out as County Championship switches to Kookaburra ball

A few years ago, any Australian coming over to play county cricket would be added to a WhatsApp group entitled: “Stevo’s gonna get ya.”

The group was named in honour of Darren Stevens, the canny former Leicestershire and Kent all-rounder who only seemed to improve with age until finally bowing out of the professional game three years ago at the age of 46.

In addition to plentiful runs, Stevens would routinely terrorise opposition batters – not only those of an Antipodean heritage – with his mid-70mph trundlers.

Inadvertently, he became ­emblematic of what some perceived to be an entrenched problem with county cricket; if Stevens could pick up wickets with his distinctly ­unfashionable bowling, the game was not adequately preparing players for the rather different rigours of ­international cricket.

During a 4-0 Ashes drubbing in 2021-22 – for which Stevens was held up as the unfortunate embodiment of English cricket’s ills – I asked him what he made of the criticism.

“I suppose I could get annoyed because my name’s at the front of it when you’ve got people saying, ‘You’ve got to change county cricket because Stevo gets wickets every week’,” he said.

“I try and ignore it. If I really think about it, I suppose it is a little unfair.”

Eight months later, the England and Wales Cricket Board, and lead author Andrew Strauss, the former England captain, published their High-Performance Review calling for all manner of alterations to English men’s cricket in a bid to strengthen the national team.

One recommendation was to trial the use of the machine-made, flatter-seamed Kookaburra ball used in most other cricketing nations in place of the hand-stitched, prominent-seam Dukes ball that Stevens excelled with in England.

The report explained that less than 20% of deliveries in county cricket exceeded 84mph, compared with more than 40% in Test cricket, while spinners bowled 22% of overs in England – the lowest of any domestic system – compared with 41% internationally.

“These numbers point to the fact that we aren’t encouraging the development of the ‘extreme’ skills required to succeed in international cricket,” wrote Strauss.

Sunday marks the proper ­realisation of that experiment. Following a ­two-game mid-season trial in 2023, and two-round early and late-season trials last summer, the Kookaburra will be used for all four upcoming peak summer County Championship rounds. As much as anything in the world of English domestic cricket can be deemed permanent, the Kookaburra is here to stay.

“There is a difference of opinion,” said Alan Fordham, the former Northamptonshire batsman who is now the ECB’s operations manager.

“But I think everyone understands why it is being done. It upskills bowlers… in respect to reverse-swing and perhaps providing more opportunities for spin bowlers as well.”

According to ECB statistics, 50% more deliveries were bowled by spinners in the 2024 Kookaburra rounds than in the remainder of the season, prompting 28.2 percent more deviation off the ground. The governing body also found the optimal speed for pace bowlers was 82-84mph with the Kookaburra compared with 76-79mph with the Dukes.

For spinners, the benefit is evident. Jack Leach and Archie Vaughan took all 20 wickets in Somerset’s thrilling victory over Surrey with the Kookaburra last September, while Warwickshire this week brought in Australian off-spinner Corey Rocchiccioli purely for the next four games due to his “experience of the Kookaburra ball”.

Less successful was last year’s early-season Kookaburra trial, which produced 17 draws from 18 high-scoring, low-jeopardy games, and has not been replicated.

That period prompted criticism from then Yorkshire head coach Ottis Gibson – “It’s a nonsense” – and Leicestershire counterpart Alfonso Thomas – “It has made average batters look very good” – among others. Alec Stewart, then Surrey’s director of cricket, had gone even further before the campaign, labelling the Kookaburra trial “the worst decision ever”.

But Rob Key, managing director of men’s cricket (and the man with the ultimate say) remains unperturbed, hailing the damp squib early last season as “fantastic” and insisting: “I would use the Kookaburra all the time. English cricket would be much better off for it”.

Key, who has presided over an era where England selection is less based on county form, believes the best way to develop bowlers for the international arena is to force them to find new ways of winning games.So while England’s bowlers take on India with a Dukes ball in hand, the Kookaburra forms part of the ­puzzle for a domestic cohort wanting to join them.

Photograph by AP/Scott Heppell