Cricket's Kookaburra experiment: Pitches must play ball too, says Yorkshire’s Dom Bess

It was the third of four rounds in this season’s Championship in which the Kookaburra is being used instead of the English Dukes, with next week’s fixture at Leicester completing the trial from Yorkshire’s perspective.

The move (up from two rounds with the Kookaburra last year) is motivated by England’s desire to replicate conditions found in international cricket overseas, but Bess, who has played 14 Test matches, including games in South Africa, Sri Lanka and India, believes that for the experiment to be successful it must be complemented by competitive surfaces.

“If you look round the circuit (last week) a lot of spinners bowled the overs, but you’ve still got to have wickets with something in them,” said Bess, who was not far short of the Yorkshire record for the most number of overs in an innings - 81 by Johnny Wardle against Derbyshire at Bradford in 1949.

“My only thing about the wicket (at Headingley) was that it was slow. You play with Kookaburras in international cricket in places abroad, but there’s also a difference in the type of wickets.

“In Sri Lanka, it spins. In South Africa, the wickets are harder with bounce and pace so you can do people, and if there’s a nick it will carry, and if there’s a bat-pad it will carry.

“Obviously, it’s a bit tougher in the English summer when you haven’t got the pace (in the pitches) at times; I’m talking generically.

“It’s tough then, and you have to find other ways, such as perhaps bowling a bit slower but still having plenty of revs on the ball.”

Bess, who took 25 of his 36 Test wickets in six appearances abroad, compared with 11 in eight Test matches in England, likes the feeling of bowling with the Kookaburra.

However, the fact that the Middlesex match produced 1,273 runs for the loss of just 18 wickets across the four days, with barely a weather interruption in sight, backs up his point as well as any, while the marginalised nature of the competition works against spinners of all stripes.

“I’ve always enjoyed bowling with it (the Kookaburra) in terms of out of my hand, but if the pitches are dead and flat and slow it’s hard,” said Bess.

“The way English cricket is set up (in terms of the schedule), it’s obviously not for spinners at all.

“In April and September, sometimes you produce spinners (pitches), but sometimes you produce absolute green snake-pits which actually completely takes the spinners out of the game.

“There were times out there (at Headingley) where the ball spun, but because it was so slow the batter could even adjust to a ball that was spinning, which I don’t think is a pleasing thing to see.”

For Bess, the endurance needed to bowl 70.4 overs in one innings was offset by the pleasure he felt at being selected full-stop.

Dan Moriarty, who bowled 61 overs himself, was chosen in preference at the start of the season, with Moriarty having played in seven Championship games to Bess’s three.

“I’m just glad to be bowling Championship overs, to be honest,” said Bess. “This was just my third game, so, in that regard, it was nice to be back out there with the boys.

“I just said to Jon (Jonny Tattersall, the Yorkshire stand-in captain) that I’ll keep bowling and bowling until either we bowl them out or the game finishes because you can’t replace Championship overs, you can’t replace bowling.

“I don’t think we could have done any more, to be honest; Moz (Moriarty) was really unlucky, but to keep coming back as he did was a testament to himself.”

The draw saw third-placed Yorkshire close the gap on second-placed Middlesex to just one point with three matches left.

Sussex are 20 points ahead of Yorkshire, with the top two sides going up.

“Two of our last three games are away (Leicestershire and Glamorgan), and that will be a real test of character because we’ll be going into conditions that we don’t have full control of,” added Bess.

“But I think days like these (against Middlesex) will hopefully stand us in good stead and we’ll look back on them and say that’s where we want to be as blokes and as a team.

“Hopefully, we’ll look back on it fondly at the end of the season and with real pride as well.

“There’s always going to be pressure on playing for Yorkshire, and probably after seven games with the line-up we had, we weren’t in the best spot, but it’s all about how we’ve come back and we’ve got three games now and three great opportunities to get promotion.”