The County Championship returns this weekend, but the English first-class competition will be trialling Kookaburra balls to prepare players for future Ashes series in Australia.
The Australia-made ball, which traditionally swings and seams less than its English counterpart, will be used by the eighteen counties this week following a trial recommendation from the ECB’s high-performance review. Subsequently, England’s players will have some match experience with the machine-stitched Kookaburra before venturing to Australia for the 2025/26 Ashes.
England has not won an Ashes Test in Australia since January 2011, with the touring side registering 13 defeats and two draws in the 12 years since.
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In 2020, former England captain Joe Root advocated for the Kookaburra to feature in the County Championship, suggesting it would benefit the competition’s seam bowlers.
“(The Kookaburra) is a flat seam, does not stay as hard for as long, so our bowlers get used to bowling with something that does not do as much,” he told The Telegraph at the time.
“Batters get used to that style of cricket, which can be slow and attritional at times.
“Anything to prolong games and incentivise bowlers in particular to be more skilful and encourage them to bowl fast, or really accurate, have good reverse-swing skills that can travel well in Australia and Asia, would be great for us.”
Cricket Australia experimented with using the Dukes ball during the second half of the Sheffield Shield season between 2016 and 2020, a change that was designed to help players adapt to England’s swinging conditions. However, CA scrapped the initiative in 2020 following consultation with states and players, with head of operations Peter Roach acknowledging its impact on the standard of spin bowling.
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The Kookaburra will be used in a second round of County Championship games next month – but not everyone is on board with the initiative.
“I am nervous that every time we have a poor Ashes, we dream up something to make county cricket better,” Sussex coach and former England assistant Paul Farbrace told BBC Radio Sussex.
“I‘m not sure that experimenting for two rounds with the Kookaburra is necessarily going to help English cricket go forward. Just because the Aussies play with a Kookaburra, why should we?
“If you play on good pitches then you can play with the Dukes ball. Teams across the country have produced excellent wickets to play on this year, despite some poor weather for a period.
“So my view is we don‘t need it and I think that’s the consistent view of a lot of people. But we’ve got to get on with it.”
Warwickshire coach Mark Robinson was less sceptical about the Kookaburra’s introduction, but argued the ploy’s timing wasn’t ideal.
“It‘s interesting in the middle of an Ashes series. All the bowlers in contention for England are having to use a ball they won’t use in the Test matches so probably the timing is wrong,” Robinson told BBC CWR.
“Ideally it could have been done in September or in April or May. But it‘s part of county cricket and all the vagaries of the game that makes it exciting, interesting and different and we’ll embrace it.
“We‘ve been practising a little bit. It’s exciting, we knew it was happening, so let’s get on with it.”
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