Two new balls removed the best bowler of the last ten overs

A regulation designed to keep the white ball visible destroyed the only phase where an ordinary seamer became a match-winner.

Give a bowler a ball that is fifty overs old, dry, scuffed on one side and polished on the other, and a certain kind of seamer becomes almost unplayable at the death. That bowler barely exists in the fifty-over game now, and the reason is administrative rather than athletic. Two new balls, one from each end, means neither is ever more than twenty-five overs old, and reverse swing needs age.

The rule came in for reasonable motives. White balls discolour, get soft, and become hard to see under lights, and there had been years of complaints about a grey lump being replaced arbitrarily by an umpire from a box. Two new balls solved the visibility question cleanly. It also handed the bowling side two hard balls for the middle overs, which sounds like a gift and is not, because a hard ball with a proud seam is a ball that comes on to the bat and disappears to the boundary off a half-decent swing of the arms.

So the middle overs got easier for batters and the last ten got much easier, and then everyone wrote articles about how modern hitters had redefined what a chase looks like. Some of that is true. A good part of it is that the ball in their hands at the eightieth ball of an innings is a completely different object from the one their predecessors faced.

The obvious fix is one ball with a rule permitting a change at a fixed point, or simply a better ball that stays visible longer, which is a manufacturing problem and not a philosophical one. Boards have tinkered around the edges of this for years.

What I object to is pretending the format evolved. It was legislated. Somebody wrote a paragraph and the craft of an entire bowling type went with it.

You can still see it in the shorter format, where one ball is used and reverse occasionally shows up in the nineteenth over, usually at a dry ground late in a season. Watch a batter's face when it does.