Pink-ball Tests can be a lottery. This one hurt Test cricket

8 hours ago 2

A young fast bowler called Mitchell Starc was one of the most vocal critics when a pink-ball Test match was first added to the Australian summer 10 years ago.

“Whether you have to start a whole new set of stats for the pink ball, as you do with the red and white ball, I guess it throws up a huge number of questions,” an unimpressed Starc said at the time.

Pink-ball Test matches can be a lottery for batters.

So sceptical were some players from both Australia and New Zealand – Brendon McCullum among them – that the game at Adelaide Oval was afforded a unique prize-money pot to ensure they took the field: $1 million split 60/40 between the winners and losers.

For Cricket Australia and its then chief executive James Sutherland, this was a small price to pay for the introduction of Test cricket in prime time, instantly adding a multimillion-dollar bounty to the rights fees paid then by Nine, and since 2018 by Foxtel and Seven.

But those private views about pink-ball Tests being a virtual fourth format for cricket, rather than a part of the red-ball tradition stretching back to 1877, remain popular among players.

They had little reason to be dissuaded from those opinions during the chaotic third Test in Jamaica, where the West Indies suffered yet another humiliation to add to plenty in recent years, razed for just 27 and slotting in the second-lowest total recorded in Test matches.

Mitchell Starc has had a complicated relationship with the pink ball.

This game was added to the calendar following Shamar Joseph’s pink-ball heroics in Brisbane early last year. It was hoped the more favourable time slot would help find an Australian broadcaster for the series. But the contest at the Gabba was far more finely balanced between bat and ball.

Players and coaches were scathing of the pink Dukes balls used for the game, which on the best pitch of the series seamed and swerved like a spitting cobra. Things were still more difficult under lights, the ball appearing to gather pace off the pitch and helping tall paceman Alzarri Joseph look as dangerous as Curtly Ambrose once was.

Alex Carey was pinged on the helmet and could not keep in the fourth innings with concussion, while Steve Smith spoke afterwards as though he had been batting in a lottery rather than a Test match. “If you’re just going to sit there,” he said, “you’re probably a sitting duck.”

Starc’s assessment was more measured, but by pointing to the extra seam movement on offer, gave a clue as to why batters found the going so difficult. Swing bowling, even at Starc’s pace, at least gives the batter some chance to adjust for the movement. Deviation off the seam offers no such chance.

“The pink Kookaburra swings more ... the pink Dukes certainly seams more and for a longer period,” Starc said.

For all the difficulties of the night sessions, the most dramatic scenes of batting carnage unfolded in broad daylight when Starc, Josh Hazlewood and Scott Boland walked out to defend a fourth innings target of 204.

This was a case of West Indian batting poverty colliding with a motivated and well-calibrated Starc.

In the first innings, he had swung a few too many deliveries down the leg side while hitting the pads almost as often. Second time around he got his radar into precision mode, and what followed was clinical in its swiftness.

“Obviously being bowled out for less than 30 is quite embarrassing,” lamented the West Indian captain Roston Chase.

Before the game, the Caribbean side had given Starc a leg-up by dropping their seasoned opener Kraigg Brathwaite, who has never been a player with an attractive style but always knew where his stumps were. It’s unlikely he would have shouldered arms as wretchedly as Kevlon Anderson.

The souped-up pink Dukes ball, a well-grassed pitch, a desperately poor West Indian top order and a fired-up Starc made for a perfect storm. It said much for the scenario that Australian captain and fast bowling spearhead Pat Cummins did not even need to mark out his run.

If there is a wider conclusion to be drawn from the chaos at Sabina Park, it is that the pink ball will never be more than a commercial earner in Australia and an occasional oddity for Test cricket elsewhere. Substituting a red ball for a pink ball in the event of bad light? Forget about it.

West Indies’ Brandon King is bowled by Australia’s Mitchell Starc on the third and final day of the Test in Jamaica.

In fairness to Sutherland, the concept’s biggest advocate, he never argued for the pink ball to be anything other than a useful value-add to Test cricket’s bottom line in the right circumstances and conditions. Only 11 pink-ball Tests have been played outside Australia in 10 years.

“Not for one moment are we saying we want to play day-night cricket all the time that we play Test cricket,” Sutherland had said.

“At certain times of year in certain parts of the world, it is appropriate because you can capture greater audiences. When people work and kids are at school, it’s an opportunity for more fans to have access to the game.”

Australia have played more pink-ball Tests than any team (14), and been victorious in every one of them. Its introduction may have been a commercial decision, but the pink ball has also become a performance advantage for Starc’s generation.

Ten years on, Starc’s views have mellowed rather more than the sting of his bowling.

“I’ve softened the stance on it,” he said.

“I still think it’s one you want to be careful of – you don’t want to overdo what it is. It’s a great product in Adelaide. I’m still a traditionalist – I still very much love the red-ball game – but I’ve grown to see a place for it.”

A place for the pink Kookaburra maybe. But as one Australian team member quipped after Jamaica, this particular pink Dukes ball may need to go on the “banned list”.

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