“New ball bowlers will look forward to bowling with this,” grinned Stuart Broad, just after zipping one past his best mate Luke Wright’s outside edge in a live demonstration on Sky last Friday. Broad was referring to the pink Dukes ball, which he will use at Edgbaston when England play West Indies in a day-night Test in August, and in nine Championship games from Monday.
These rather lovely little pink things are made at the endearingly ramshackle warehouse that is Dukes’ north-east London home, and Dilip Jajodia, the company’s boss, is explaining the process to the Spin. It is a den of organised chaos and mastercraftmanship in which he estimates there are 120,000 balls. Everything is done by hand, from the milling and polishing of the balls to the notes and labelling, before they are distributed across the cricketing globe. Jajodia has a box he carries around containing the component parts of a Dukes that he explains to anyone who will listen, and another with a century-old Dukes to show how well they age. He says his white ball would end the need for a ball from each end in ODIs and reckons the England and Wales Cricket Board should use his orange ball for its new T20 tournament from 2020. He is most bullish regarding these pink balls, however.
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