Balls: a brief history

A few days ago scandal was once again unleashed in the cricket world when 17-year-old Shahid Afridi was found to have bitten into a cricket ball.

No, that is not a metaphor. (Though, if you ask me, the phrase "to bite the cricket ball" is just begging to be used in a profound metaphorical sense. Like other popular metaphors, such as "grabbing the bull by the horns" or "it quickly devolved into a hashtag".)

In fact, the young Afridi actually chomped into a cricket ball with his bare teeth. His fiendish plan, experts say, was to deform the surface of the ball so as to create reverse swing, so that the Australian batsmen, instead of lazily hitting fours over midwicket, would be forced into hitting sixes over long-off.

Indeed, if you look closely at the video clip that shows Afridi's dental deviousness, you can see bowler Rana Naved suppressing a smile that says: "I can't wait to reverse-swing!" And also: "I rubbed that into my crotch two minutes ago. Afridi hygiene fail. Giggle."

The ICC immediately swooped on Afridi for his sordid gamesmanship. Afridi tried to save face by claiming that he was merely trying to smell the ball. This is now a landmark case study in the field of "how never to save face".

The ICC laughed off this explanation and meted out extremely harsh punishment. Afridi was tragically banned from playing two whole, entire Twenty20 matches. Instantly the Pakistani cricket authorities proclaimed that the 15-and-a-half-year-old had become the youngest cricketer ever to have been banned for biting a ball.

All this, of course, served to bring that seldom praised element of cricket back to the limelight: the cricket ball. It is magical, mystical and spherical. And owning one was always something of a childhood mini-goal.

To this day I have only ever handled a real authentic tournament cricket ball half a dozen times. And even then, never in an actual tournament situation. I have spotted the rascals inside display cases, on bookshelves next to statuary, or on some co-worker's tabletop, carefully kept as a memento.

And by virtue of always having heard of them but never having seen them in real life, I tend to handle an authentic cricket ball like jewellery. Or iPads. Slowly running my fingers over the stitching, holding it up to the light and then tossing it from hand to hand. Solemnly.

Then secretly, deep inside, I rue the ridiculous alternatives I was forced to settle for during my cricketing career.

The earliest childhood days were blighted by stupid hollow plastic balls that defied all laws of physics. You had to play with them in entirely windless rooms. Even the lightest gust would blow the ball right across the room, through the window and into the dining room, where it would proceed to pinball around for a full 40 minutes, hitting every single piece of furniture before accurately coming to repose in the fish curry.

The only thing worse was the hollow plastic cricket bat. At least 60% of India's non-bio-degradable waste is hollow plastic cricket bat.

Later came the hollow rubber ball. Sort of like a clean-shaven tennis ball. To give Afridi credit, this is one ball you took to face once in a while. If the ball ever split open - and the things split like an Eastern-bloc gymnast - there would be a sudden burst of some very chemical vapour from inside. A byproduct from its manufacturing perhaps. Inhaled quickly and deeply enough, this ball gas provided an instant lift. Priming you well for fun cricket in the short term and college education later.

College is when I first came across two deadly varieties: the taped PVC tennis ball and the solid cork "family problem" ball. (Because if it hit you, you had trouble making a family. Wink. Nudge. Ouch.)

I actually liked the tape ball. You created this illegitimate love child of adhesive and tennis by tightly wrapping a not-too-fuzzy tennis ball with a generous roll of thick, shiny insulation tape. (The type used by plumbers and electricians.) The tape prevented the ball from splitting, gave it a shiny, skiddy bounce, and made it fly off the bat with a satisfying cracking noise.

And when it hit you on the face or in the shins, it hurt like a mother. The tape ball and its associated injuries were a good baptism for many cricket fans.

The solid cork ball, on the other hand, gave you injuries that stayed with you for a lifetime. If you survived. The ball was made out of 100% compressed, shaped cork. Now I know what you are thinking: "Cork is that soft little thing they make bulletin boards out of. How much can it hurt?"

That is like saying you like hamburgers, so it is okay if you get run over by a herd of stampeding cattle.

But then this was the closest you could get to the ball the professionals played with.

The one benefit of the corker was that the thing would last forever before, thousands of matches and compound fractures later, it suddenly disintegrated into several tiny pieces mid-delivery.

If you managed to somehow survive all these, attain adolescence, and your club or college had some money, then you had a chance to finally deal with the real cricket ball, with stitching and logos and that shine. Alas, my club neither had the money, nor I the wherewithal.

Not that I think I'd ever be able to play with a stitch ball. Those things are too complicated. They are for professionals. Professionals with ability. Professionals with skill. Professionals like 13-year-old prodigy Afridi. Professionals with teeth.