According to anecdotal evidence, wobble-seam – where the bowler places his index finger on one side of the seam, his middle finger on the other – had long been used, before the term was coined (the same with reverse swing). What is novel is that wicketkeepers in the past year have stood up to the stumps to receive it, so the batsman’s scope is curtailed; he is pinned to his crease, as Root has been. The old recipe to counter swing bowling was to stand outside the crease: no such solution against wobble-seam, since Australia’s Alex Carey set the trend.
Sir James Anderson had all this expertise at his fingertips. Robinson, however, challenges the batsman more, by bowling a fuller length, and straighter, and from a higher release point. He also has Jamie Smith combining in a double act: of Robinson’s 28 Test wickets this summer, all bar two came with the wicketkeeper standing up. (Moreover, England’s keepers now have the benefit of being trained by Sarah Taylor, who spent most of her career standing up to England Women’s seamers.)
So many variables go into every Test match in England that no single remedy is to hand. We seem fated to play on pitches which are ever more over-used, because ever more fixtures have to be staged. Hybrid pitches – part-natural turf, part-artificial fibre – are fine for slogathons like T20 and the Hundred. But to use them for a Test match brings predictability, when the key to sport is uncertainty.
The Dukes ball then? Yes, of course it can be altered: what is made by hand can be altered by hand. But this is not so simple as it once was. Back in 1990, to help batsmen, Dukes reduced the number of strands in each thread from 15 to nine, thereby reducing the prominence of the seam – and Graham Gooch scored more runs in one Test, 456 against India at Lord’s, than anyone before or since. So the number of strands was increased, and seams became prouder again.
But now the strands are thicker, so only six go into each thread; and it is no longer flax from Northern Ireland, so diverse suppliers around Europe are involved. Dilip Jajodia, the owner of Dukes, calls himself “a guardian of the game” and he is not being self-opinionated. “We will not deviate from making cricket balls to British standards. I’d have to do a lot of testing before reducing the number of threads from six to five, and that might have the knock-on effect of reducing the tension with which the ball is stitched together by hand.” A welcome feature of this summer was that the ball did not forever need to be changed.