Shaun Pollock calls for pink-ball Test change, bad light controversy, ICC rules, latest news

South African great Shaun Pollock believes cricket needs to embrace the pink ball in matches where light is likely to become a factor given the amount of time that has been lost in the Test behind held in Durban this week.

A new rule introduced by the International Cricket Council at the start of October allows the pink ball to be used in day Tests, but only if the captains of both teams agree to it.

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Its use in the opening Test of the Australia vs South Africa series would have extended play for longer on each of the opening three days that were shortened due to fading light.

Only 221 of the 270 allotted overs were completed through to the start of the fourth day, though play extended beyond 5pm on Monday as the cloud cover that had blanketed the ground in the afternoon earlier in the Test stayed away.

The brilliant bowling performance of the Australians on Monday night has also eased the extent to which they will need to chase the clock on the final day, with the tourists requiring only six more wickets to win.

But that does not detract from the point of Pollock, who urged captains to not “be scared to use the pink ball” in matches where light could regularly be a factor, as has been the case here and in nations including Pakistan.

“I’m not saying for one moment that we should have used the pink ball and played a day-night game. I just believed we should have used the pink ball for the day game,” he said.

“It is not irrelevant because if you use the red one, all of a sudden you can’t play Test cricket past bad light time, but if you use the pink one, you can. (And) we are going to lose some more overs.

“If this was a final or a game where you had to win to make the World Test Championship final and it was 1-all in the series, and Australia was playing South Africa and you said to them, ‘Let’s use the pink ball because we are going to lose 100 overs to bad light’ do you think they would agree or not agree?”

Former South African captain Ashwell Prince, who now works as a senior assistant, was quizzed about this at stumps on Day 3 and was blunt about what his answer would be.

“For me, outside of a day-night Test, it’s got to be a red ball,” he said.

“I think obviously some nations have played a lot more pink ball cricket than others and so, therefore, to get both captains to agree is always going to be a challenge.

“To get both captains to agree to that, some teams will feel that they simply don’t have enough experience of it, so I think it’d be very difficult to get both captains to agree. But for me, you know, Test matches are the red ball.”

Former Australian test opener Phil Jaques told foxsports.com.au the concept was definitely worth investigating, but believes more data is needed before opposing captains will agree to put the pink ball in use.

“They probably need to try that out at some point to see how it unfolds,” he said.

“I could see it being (considered). It’s definitely one way to look at it and one way to go about it, but they do need to ditch the stigma around it because there is a stigma around it that in the daytime it doesn’t do enough and in the night time it does too much.

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“You’ve only got to look at scorecards to know that it probably is true at the moment, in the daytime especially. They don’t tend to buff up as much as the red ball, from my opinion, and under lights, it’s just harder for a batter under lights rather than in the daytime, as opposed to the ball doing more as such.

“They do leave quite a lot of grass on the wickets when they do play the day-night games and how the pink ball would stack up on a normal-length grass wicket would be an interesting test case.”

Jaques, who is in Durban providing expert analysis for the ABC, suspects a pink ball might not “nip around” as much as the red ball early on if used.

“I suppose the day-night hours as well, you’ve got to look at the fact that the daytime batting is after tea,” he said.

“So the wicket has had a day where the covers haven’t been on the wicket, so you’re not having the fresh wicket that you have in the morning as well.

“So I think there probably needs to be a time where they do try it in a daytime game with a pink ball starting at 9:30am like this one and see what would happen, because at the moment we haven’t got any real evidence as to how it would play in the morning.

“Will it have the same amount of nibble that you get with the red ball in the morning, where you are still able to create 20 opportunities to win games of cricket? Or will it be the flat scenario that we see with the pink daytime games during the day-night games?”

Simon Katich has the rare experience of playing a first class game facing an orange ball, having done so on debut in a Sheffield Shield match at the Gabba.

Cricket Australia trialled orange and yellow balls with a view to using them in day-night matches and Katich said the orange ball retained its hardness.

“I debuted for WA back in 1997 and it was with an orange ball at the Gabba, which has generally been conducive to bowling over the years and the orange ball was not hard to see,” he said in a segment for the host broadcaster alongside Pollock.

“It stayed harder, probably, than the pink ball does. That problem you talk about with the pink ball going softer later in the innings, that didn’t tend to be the case with the orange ball.

“It tended to be pretty hard around that 60 to 70 over mark and as a batter, you don’t mind that because you know you are getting value for your shots.”

Rob Elliot, the former managing director of Kookaburra, told the Herald Sun in 2010 that trials were discontinued of the orange ball because on television it appeared to develop a “comet-like tail that flared and sometimes got lost in the background”.

Pollock is hopeful the stigma associated with the pink ball dissipates in order to enable play to continue.

“There is a stigma that has been created around the pink ball,” he said.

“First of all they say that it moves too much but I tell you what, If Australia was 124-6 using the pink ball, everyone would have said it was the pink ball’s fault.

“There is another stigma around it – that the pink ball gets soft – and if Australia was 124-6 and got to 390, everyone in South Africa would have said it was the pink ball’s fault and that it got soft.

“But the pink ball would have meant that we would have played 45 more overs of Test cricket (by yesterday) if we had used it and that is why I am keen to introduce it (and) I am saying in a day game when light is going to play a part, ‘Don’t be scared to use the pink ball’.”