Head of Kookaburra not happy about ball tampering

The head of the company that made the Kookaburra ball that was tampered with wishes it hadn’t happened.

The Kookaburra has been the ball of choice for Test cricket in Australia, New Zealand and, yes, South Africa since 1946

They’ve given the country a black eye as far as our sporting reputation is concerned but at least the Australian cricketers were being patriotic by putting their makeshift sandpaper to work on an Australian ball.

It wasn’t just any ball they were tampering with. It was a Kookaburra, the ball of choice for Test cricket in Australia, New Zealand and, yes, South Africa since 1946. Yet even Terry O’Brien, the chairman of AG Thompson, the Melbourne company that manufactures them, wishes it were otherwise.

“It doesn’t look good on the surface of it and, you know, obviously we wish our ball wasn’t involved,” O’Brien told the The Australian’s Global Food Forum in Sydney yesterday. “We wish it was a Dukes and then we could point at them.”

Yet it was the surface that caused the problem in the first place. Had the Kookaburra behaved like the English ball, there would have been no reason to break out the sticky tape. The Dukes ball has a proud seam and swings like a pendulum.

But the Kookaburra, like (nearly) all Aussies, is straight up and down, which is good if you’re a batsman but a little wearing if you’re a bowler. But with a rub of sandpaper here and a scrape of fingernail there, it too can suddenly start hooping all over the place.

O’Brien initially did see a bright side: “My first thought was maybe it’s an opportunity for a new product … you know, a pre-tampered ball.”

He thought better of it. Under the circumstances, that might have been a bit rough all around.