After scathing criticism from various coaches and a post-season meeting between directors of cricket, attended by England’s managing director Rob Key, the county championship is likely to scrap its controversial experiment with Kookaburra balls. The machine-stitched, Australia-made balls had been used in the Championship for the past three seasons. In 2023, it was used for two rounds, before an expansion to four of the 14 rounds in 2024 and 2025, while other games featured the traditional hand-stitched Dukes. Its biggest advocate was Key himself, but the opposition was so stiff that he had to relent. The ball's tendency to lose sting after the initial overs was the biggest drawback. It led to a disturbing amount of tepid draws. Last year, 17 of the first 18 matches using the Australian-made ball ended as a draw. This season, Surrey posted a club-record score of 9-820 in a Kookaburra clash against Durham in London, while during the same round Warwickshire declared on 7-679 while facing Hampshire. There were 59 centuries during the first two rounds of Kookaburra matches of this year’s County Championship, with an average first-innings total of 430. "Hopefully it’s an experiment we don’t carry on with. The ball goes very soft very quickly and there’s no competition between bat and ball when it’s a good wicket with a Kookaburra early season in England,” Middlesex coach Richard Johnson said last year. Surrey’s former Director of Cricket Alec Stewart called the Kookaburra ball’s introduction “the worst decision ever”, while Yorkshire head coach Anthony McGrath said he was “not sure why we are using it”. "We don't play Test cricket in England with a Kookaburra and if we are thinking about the next series in Australia playing with a Kookaburra, then the people who are going to play in that series probably need to be using a Kookaburra ball as well," McGrath would say. Northamptonshire's Australian Darren Lehman too was one of its vehement critics. "I wouldn’t be using it, you’re trying to create something that’s not going to work in England. The Kookaburra ball is for Australian conditions on wickets that are harder and have got some carry. The Dukes ball, we’ve tried that before in an Ashes for example, a Dukes ball goes all over the shop in Australia and the game’s finished in two days. They’re trying to get ready for an Ashes which is a pretty important thing for England cricket but for me you’ve just got to put up with it and find a way through it," he had explained. Key's logic, triggered by England's capitulation in Australia in the 2021-22 Ashes, when introducing Kookaburra balls on an experimental basis was that it would improve the quality of the game in the county circuit. "“I would use the Kookaburra all the time. English cricket would be much better off for it. Teams need to find quicker bowlers or ones who will force a wicket. You can’t just keep running up bowling at 75mph. And in terms of those guys who are not express, you really work out who can bowl. “I want us to be the best team in the world for a generation; this will be one way to do that.”
