SG test: Story of 85-year-old firm and complexity of painting a cricket ball pink

[Kool_SRG]

Sanspareils Greenlands has already got down to business of making the pink ball after BCCI announced the D/N Test.

 

Not part of the in-vogue D/N Tests, India’s iconic red cherry is busy planning a comeback. Daksh Panwar tells the story of a 85-year-old firm and the complexity of painting a cricket ball pink

A bespectacled, weather-beaten face appears from behind the newspaper at the cash counter of a dhaba in Meerut and shoots a quizzical look at you. “Kaunsa land?” he asks. “Sahn-pah-rails Greenlands,” you say again, pronouncing Sanspareils Greenlands as authentically as you can. “Maloom nahi. idhar nahi hai,” he says, dismissively. “SG hai?” “Vo cricket ke samaan wali, vo hai. Aap aisa karo, samne flyover se…”

In its expanded form, it sounds like one of the many real estate projects that dot the Delhi-Meerut highway. When abbreviated, however, ‘SG’ makes you think cricket. Sunil Gavaskar comes to mind instantly. As do images of the finest quality bats and the luscious red ball with a prominent seam that is used for Tests in India. It is for the latter and the threat to existence it faces from a rival ball of a different hue that we take directions from the dhabawallah.

 

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‘Sans pareil’ means without parallel or peerless. That SG certainly isn’t.

The success of the pink ball Test between Australia and New Zealand in Adelaide last November has titillated the Indian board sufficiently for it to announce that the Indian team would play a day-and-night Test against the visiting Black Caps later this year. Another one, against Australia, is likely early next year. “There are lots of factors that need to be taken into account,” Thakur said in April. “Dew factor, how the spinners bowl with the pink Kookaburra on Indian pitches. These things we will get an idea (of) during the Duleep Trophy.”

Should these plans come to fruition, a ramification would be the Australian ball maker Kookaburra closing in on one of the last bastions in five-day cricket it hasn’t conquered. Seven out of 10 Test-playing countries use the Kookaburra ball; the Duke ball is used in England and the West Indies; while India uses the SG. Though Thakur said a pink SG ball remains a possibility in the future, it will have to match the Kookaburra’s quality. “We may ask SG to manufacture pink balls later but that has to be of the quality of pink balls that Kookaburra produces,” he said.

Having seen the straw in the wind, SG has already got down to business.

A worker hangs cork balls in yarn before leather is stitched over them at the SG manufacturing unit in Meerut.

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Very discreetly, the airport road shoots off to NH-58 as you enter Meerut from Delhi. A couple of kilometers down the road is the SG factory — one of the three facilities the 85-year-old firm has in the town. It is impressive, SG is after all one of the bigger SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) in India. A massive, well-manicured lawn overlooks the main entrance of the building and there is a bronze statue of a batsman playing a stroke. There is no similar sculpture of a bowler, though. It symptomatic of two things: in India, cricket mostly means batting, and SG has reached where it is today chiefly by making bats. Its bat business accounts for about 40 percent of the turnover, 48 percent comes from protective gear and apparel business. Balls contribute only 12 percent.

Of that 12 percent, only a very insignificant number comes from the balls that the BCCI uses for Tests. So you would imagine that a stray match or two being played with a pink Kookaburra can’t possibly be much of a concern for SG, right? Wrong, if you believe Paras Anand, SG’s marketing director and a third-generation member of the family-run company. The way he sees it is that being the official suppliers of the Test ball in India gives them legitimacy and, therefore, precious brand equity. The firm becomes, in a way, a representative of Indian cricket.

“Even though it’s much smaller part of our turnover, it’s important, very important part of the business,” he says. “It’s because the recognition that the SG ball gets. There was a time, maybe 10-15 years ago when our bat was more recognised, but the ball gets more recognition now. The reason being it is used for Tests in India. That’s a huge source of pride for us.”

Therefore, when Kookaburra was perfecting the pink ball, SG was monitoring the development minutely. And when the Adelaide Test happened and was hailed as the way forward for Test cricket globally, SG began to work on its own pink ball.

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To enter the production area at the factory, you have to go past ‘Eden’, ‘Lord’s’, ‘MCG’, ‘Oval’ (all conference halls) and the washroom (thankfully, they don’t call it dressing room). It opens out into a courtyard. On the left-hand side is a big airy hall where hundreds of workers are diligently cutting leather, grading it, winding cork balls in yarn, leaving them out in the sun to dry, putting them in leather cases and stitching them. The half finished product then goes to another, smaller hall where it is polished, branded and segregated. The finest ‘grade one’ balls are used for Tests and first-class games. The others — from grade two to grade four — are made available to the dealers across the country.

One unremarkable box, which doesn’t bear any brand name on it, is pulled out and placed in front of us. When the lid is opened, six resplendent pink balls reveal themselves. In a room full of traditional red balls, they stand out as a solitary cherry blossom flower would in bowl of crimson-coloured cherries. “We have developed the pink ball after the hype around it after Adelaide. The BCCI hasn’t sounded us out. This is something that we are doing on our own. But I think an indication is there (from the board). Once the experiment goes well — hopefully in the next month or two — we will be able to give that ball to the board to try it out,” Anand says.

It sounds optimistic given that Kookaburra took a decade to develop and perfect the ball. Agreed SG will take much less, for they don’t have to conceptualise and create a whole new product from scratch, nevertheless to ensure optimum quality and durability will be tricky. “There is no rocket science behind the making of pink ball,” Anand insists. “It’s not that your are trying to make a completely different product or there is new technology involved or there is a patent. It’s the same process — marginally different from the red ball, yes, but the same as the white ball.”

There is no patent, alright, but there are certain trade secrets. For example, there is a special film that Kookaburra sprays on the pink ball so that it doesn’t lose the shine too quickly. SG will have to come up with a credible alternative of their own, and quickly. Moreover, SG’s white ball itself hasn’t been successful because of quality issues. India, in fact, uses Kookaburra for domestic and international limited-overs matches as well as for the IPL.

“The white ball we now have is a lot more improved one to what we had earlier,” says Anand. “The demand is so high that we are not able to meet that. So the next step for us is to get the official stamp on the ball. But if we get the approval now, we will have orders pouring in. So we are not geared up — not the quality of the white ball — to the production capacity,” Anand says.

Contrary to his assertions, not everyone is happy with their quality — no matter the colour of the ball.

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“I don’t want to pick on a brand and get into trouble, but I think the same ball that I bowled with in first-class cricket five-six years ago, it’s not the same. There’s definitely a lot of balls that are going out of shape. The seam is not sitting high at all. At this point of time, I seem to be enjoying the Kookaburra a lot more.”

This was what Ravichandran Ashwin had said of the SG red ball as it lost shape alarmingly on Day One of the India-South Africa Test in Bangalore in November last year. Clearly, the pink ball and the white aren’t the only challenges that SG is facing. Even more urgent is the task of maintaining the credibility of their flagship Test ball.

“The main difference in the last two-three years was the seam. So Ashwin is absolutely right. The ball that we were producing before that had a more pronounced seam, but then what was happening with the prominent seam was that after some overs, once the ball had hit the bat a few times, the seam was expanding, which is normal for the thread. As a result the ball was not passing the (nine-inch circumference) gauge used by the umpires. So it was a conscious decision on our part to ensure that the seam doesn’t expand after a certain amount of play,” Anand explains. “Now Ashwin says that he doesn’t feel the same grip, or it is losing shape. We are working on that,” Anand says.

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“No two balls are similar,” says Anand.

We know that the Kookaburra ball is markedly different from the SG ball, which again isn’t like the Duke. And that’s part of the charm of Test cricket. But balls belonging to the same stable and of the same grade can be different, too.

“There are variables. You cannot guarantee that (absolute sameness) in a product that is made out of a natural resource. It’s not made of steel or titanium. Even with bats you can’t ensure two bats are the same. Two trees are different. Similarly, hides of two different animals of the same species are different. One may have a healthy skin while the other may not. Even the hide of one animal is not uniform at all places. But as a manufacturer what you can strive for is greater consistency. You are able to say, for example, that for 40 overs, this is the likely variation the ball will show. But you can’t guarantee that the same amount of swing on the same wicket with two different balls. No.”

Anand reveals that SG frequently hears out batsmen’s concerns about their bats. However, the reason the bowlers are more vocal in their criticism is because they don’t have a choice in the matter. A ball is forced on them. All they can do is approach the umpire after some overs and ask for a replacement. For the replacement may behave differently. When even that doesn’t work, they voice their opinion in the media and call for a different brand of ball. But is that the solution?

On the same day — November 14, 2015 — when Ashwin complained about the SG cherry and praised the Kookaburra ball, the latter copped some serious flak from David Warner and Josh Hazlewood. “I’d like to give you the honest response, but I can’t,” Warner had said. “This batch of balls, from probably the past 12 months, have been pretty poor. Now it’s probably the fifth or sixth game we’ve played with Kookaburra balls where we’ve had to actually change them more than once on the field.”

Anand smiles when Warner’s exact comments are mentioned. It’s an empathetic smile, not for a rival company but a fellow ball maker. But he deems these outbursts important.

“It’s all based on the feedback that you get while the games are happening,” he says. “So based on that (what Ashwin and others have said) we have again done a lot of R & D, with our core, with our stitching, with our finishing, with our quality of leather…everything. And this season, there will be a significant difference in the quality of the ball.”

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Cricket ball-making is a complex procedure. It’s unique, too, in that you are not looking to make a product that is too durable. In a video, Dilip Jajodia, the managing director of British Cricket Balls Ltd which makes the Duke balls, speaks of a careful and gradual “obsolescence” a good ball has to have. Not unlike a pitch, it has to wear and tear gradually, as per a pattern, so that it helps pacers initially and later aids turn. And in 80 overs, ideally, it should run its course. To make such a fragile product is not only tough, for a manufacturer it’s counter-intuitive, too.

Add to this all the aforementioned vagaries attributed to the natural raw material, the manufacturing process (SG and Duke are handmade) and the constant criticism from the players, and you would imagine these companies are not so much churning a product at the end of the assembly line as a headache for themselves.

Anand takes it in his stride.

“We take it positively. Even bad publicity is good publicity. It’s worth the headache. If an international cricketer is unhappy with the ball and the media is unhappy, it’s good publicity. You are in the news. It works in India,” he laughs.