The glum end to the Test match between Pakistan and England in Abu Dhabi on Saturday – bad light stopped play, despite the floodlights being on – opened a recurring debate: what colour should balls be for Tests played into the gloom?
Pinks balls have been tested before but ICC chief Dave Richardson wondered aloud if even a greeny-yellow one would do the job. It wouldn’t be the first time a sporting ball has bounced its colours.
Cricket
Modern cricket started using a white ball for better visibility in one-day games in the 1992 World Cup, but for at least a couple of decades from the 1740s, the sport used white leather balls. As Gavin Mortimer explains in A History of Cricket in 100 Objects, we know they were red by 1843 because of Dickens’s line in Martin Chuzzlewit, in which ledgers are described as having “red backs like strong cricket balls beaten flat”.
Tennis
Professional tennis matches used to use white or black balls depending on the colour of the court. In 1972, the International Tennis Federation began to start using yellow balls (better for TV viewers to pick out) in 1972. It took Wimbledon, progressive as ever, another 14 years to, er, roll them out. Though rarely played with, white balls remain legal.
Football
In 2004, the Premier League switched to a yellow Nike ball during the winter months after the company’s “sport-vision scientists … determined that yellow is the most visible casing colour to the human eye in lower light conditions”. You’d hope, at £95, that it would do the dishes for you, too. In addition to white and yellow Premier League balls, the FA’s separate deal with Nike led to the introduction in 2013 of a “highly visible” mango-coloured ball for the FA Cup.
