Batting legend Sunil Gavaskar floats the idea of pink ball One Dayer just before the second Down Under ODI between Australia and India today. According to Gavaskar, white balls are lifeless. In the first ODI, almost 620 runs were scored and only eight wickets fall in Perth.
Gavaskar vocalised his belief that the recent dominance of bat over the ball in one-day cricket –widely attributed to a combination of flat pitches, powerful bats, strong batsmen and batsmen friendly fielding restrictions-isn’t helped by the unresponsive white balls used by the bowlers who are seeking to redress the imbalance.
“The white does nothing for bowlers. I actually call it a ‘nothing doing ball’,” said Gavaskar, one of just 11 players to have scored more than 10,000 Test runs, in an interview with The Indian Express.
“What could be interesting is that with the success of the pink ball it may (be) used in limited-overs cricket to even the balance between bat and ball.
“It needs to experiment at domestic level. Maybe the IPL can have a few matches where they can experiment with the pink ball in the initial stages and see how it goes.”
However, when asked Rohit Sharma, who attended the press conference on the eve of the match, about Gavaskar’s suggestion he dismissed it.
“I don’t agree that the white ball doesn’t do anything,” he said. “It’s a nightmare for the batsmen when you play with the two new balls and conditions are against batters; when it’s overcast the ball tends to swing a lot and there does tend to be seam movement.”
Rohit Sharma is one of the cleanest hitters of the white ball having averaged 52.28 in ODI cricket as an opener, including an unbeaten 171 in Perth.
Rohit recounted a memory of 2011 when two balls were introduced from one and each end in 50 over cricket in 2011 as providing some much-needed assistance to the bowler. Although conventional wisdom is that the rule change has made run-scoring easier for batsmen in the last ten overs.