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The Mystery of the Soft Balls Rocking Cricket
The sport has turned its ire on an 80-year-old Englishman, saying his faulty work is killing the game.
For almost four decades, Dilip Jajodia has swelled with pride watching English cricketers gallop up to the pitch to hurl red leather balls made in his tiny London workshop.
This year, the 80-year-old ball maker has had the summer from hell.
Over five ill-tempered matches in which India’s captain accused England of violating the fabled code of ethics known as the “Spirit of Cricket,” the only thing uniting the sides was railing against Jajodia’s product.
Their complaint: The balls were going soft, tilting the game in the batting team’s favor.
“We’ve had a bit of a nightmare,” said Jajodia, whose company makes Dukes, English cricket’s premier brand of ball for 260 years.
Unlike baseball, where dozens of balls are used in a game and tossed aside after minor scuffs, cricket balls endure hours of bashing and buffing.
Dilip Jajodia thinks the problem is partly in the bowlers’ heads.
Bowling (pitching) sides treat the “cherry” reverentially, shining one side on their trousers to keep it smooth and maximize lateral movement.
The trouble with Jajodia’s balls began early in the first match, in Yorkshire in June.
England’s batsmen were swatting deliveries (pitches) as if they were hitting a beachball. Indian wicketkeeper (catcher) Rishabh Pant demanded a replacement for a ball his teammates had tossed about 360 times, well before India were entitled to a new ball, which under rules is after nearly 500 deliveries.
Umpire Paul Reiffel pulled a pair of metal hoops from his pocket and pushed the offending orb through, ruling it wasn’t sufficiently misshapen for early retirement. Pant threw the ball away, earning a reprimand from cricket’s governing body.
“It’s a big problem because the ball is getting out of shape,” Pant later said.
That wasn’t the end of it. Pant is a brand ambassador for one of Jajodia’s rivals, Indian manufacturer Sanspareils Greenlands. The British press pounced, insinuating he was trying to handicap Jajodia’s expansion into India.
Umpires test the balls by pushing them through a pair of metal hoops.
The problem for Jajodia: Pant had a powerful ally in England’s captain. “Whenever we have touring teams visiting, there is an issue with the balls going soft,” Ben Stokes said.
In cricket, the ball holds near-mystical status.
Its high priests are fast bowlers who use the raised seams to pierce batsmen’s defenses by getting it to swerve in the air and deviate after bouncing. England, where damp weather, grassy pitches and hand-stitched Dukes balls amplify this movement, is their temple.
“The ball is your weapon,” said Matthew Hoggard, a former England bowler who specialized in curveball deliveries. Though scientists have figured out some of the reasons why the ball swings, its behavior often seems inexplicable.
“That’s just part of the mysteries and wonders of swing bowling,” Hoggard said.
Jajodia moved from India to England in the 1960s to work in finance. He later set up a mail-order business selling imported balls. It took off after he found a polish that improved their quality.
Jajodia bought Dukes in 1987 and applied the polish to its handmade balls. There’s no written record of how the Duke family first made cricket balls in the 1760s in Kent, southeast of London. Jajodia likes to think the process has passed down by word-of-mouth.
The stitching is now done on the Indian subcontinent before Jajodia and his colleagues apply finishing touches in London, emblazoning ‘Duke & Son’ in gold foil above the royal stamp of approval the company first received in the 18th century.
Around a core of Portuguese cork, staffers sew two leather cups, taking more than an hour to make 80 stitches by hand. For balls destined for elite matches, Jajodia tries to secure leather strips from the back of Aberdeen Angus cattle, where the hide is thickest.
Skilled bowlers wield the stitching as a rudder. Like on a baseball, the seam creates turbulence on one side when it slices through the air at an angle. That leads to a pressure differential, which causes swing.
This summer, “jaffas”—unplayable balls that arc and dart—were rare, prompting complaints that Jajodia’s balls have lost their vim. Batsmen racked up more runs than in any other five-match series in cricketing history.
Retired English bowler and commentator Stuart Broad taunted Jajodia’s balls on television. Gesticulating with a Dukes specimen, he said, “It’s soft. I can squeeze that.”
Jajodia has gathered balls used in the series and will spend the next few months investigating. Complicating the search, his supply chain stretches from the Scottish Highlands to India, and the balls have been thrashed. What’s more, cricket balls are supposed to degrade over a day’s play, bringing different skills to the fore.
“Cricket balls, generally, are a vulnerable sort of product,” he said. “It is a natural raw-material product and no two cows are the same.”
Imperfections in the leather, the strength of modern batsmen and a heat wave may have played a part, said Jajodia.
He thinks the problem is partly in the bowlers’ heads. “It’s human nature. If you’re not getting wickets, you’ve got to find something to do.”
No one called to thank him for a good batch after the fourth and fifth matches went without a hitch, he added.
As for the result, England and India bashed it out over 25 match days. At the end of the final match, one of the closest ever, an injured England player batted with his left arm in a sling in a failed effort to secure victory. The series ended in a draw.
Write to Joe Wallace at joe.wallace@wsj.com
