F ifa has tossed back the sponsored ball which was expensively
designed for June’s World Cup: it was too inclined to wobble in flight. Also last week, the ongoing fuss over the size and aerodynamics of the golf ball came to an interim conclusion when both the Royal & Ancient and the US Golf Association admitted secret research into the manufacture of a larger, lighter ball which can be propelled less far. Modern clubs and a stronger generation have been pinging the thing such distances that many of the game’s fabled courses are becoming obsolete.
The ball is kernel, core and be-all of so many games that such news items make you realise how sparse is the homage that history has paid to it. The unsung, innocent ball, simply, makes sport’s whole world go round. No prolix poet pronounces lofty paeans to The Ball; soccer’s penny-a-liner hacks sniffily pass it off as the leather, the sphere, the orange, the orb, the globe, the pill, the pigskin, the bladder, or just the (see above) ‘thing’. In cricket, the noble ball has to answer to the cherry, the jaffa, the turnip, even the crimson rambler; in tennis, it’s the fuzz or the furr; in golf, the pea, the pellet, the puck, the bead, the aspirin, the dimpled onion. Yet no ball equals no game. QED. In 1887, with the 22 Casuals and Old Westminsters stripped for action at 2.15, the throng at the London Cup Final at Crystal Palace had to wait till 3.10 as an exhaustive search round Sydenham sought a proper blown-up leather football. Sixty years ago this spring was the second-longest delay in a Cup final — when the ball burst at Wembley in 1946 and a new inner tube had to be inserted and inflated.
The ball was invented long before the wheel. ‘Let’s play ball’ was the cry aeons before Columbus, on his second voyage, saw Haitians playing with ‘perfectly rounded globes’ fashioned and dried ‘from miraculous gum of a tree’. A rubber ball’s influence had become all-pervading once Charles Goodyear’s US invention of vulcanisation in 1839 coincided with Victorian Britain’s eruptive codification of a myriad games. The hard ‘modern’ cricket ball (cork and worsted tightened inside leather) was first used in Kent in 1770, but once round rubber bladders were designed exclusively (at Leeds a precise cen tury later) to inflate inside bespoke leather casing, the first FA Cup Final and rugby internationals were only a couple of years away. The ball, of course, is fundamental to manifold aspects of cricket: seam, shine, inswing, outswing, reverse swing, new ball, old ball, out-of-shape ball, no-ball, lost ball. In batting, too: in the summer of 1990 alone, after English cricket changed the balls made by the Reader company for those of their ancient rivals Duke & Son, 179,360 first-class runs were scored compared with 154,232 the season before.
A pig’s bladder is oval in shape; thus William Gilbert, bootmaker of Rugby, made his prototype for students at the public school next door. His name lives on: Jonny Wilkinson kicked his 2003 World Cup winner with a ‘Gilbert’ ball. Just as Ulsterman Fred Gardiner scored his decisive try with a Gilbert for Ireland against France at Dublin in 1909 and that evening met his friend, James Joyce, in the bar at The Hibernian. ‘Y’know, Fred,’ said the writer, ‘y’didn’t play with a ball today, by definition balls are round; nor even with an oval, which demands a plane configuration: y’played with a prolate spheroid.’ At which revelation, Gardiner exclaimed, ‘Jaysus, Jim, so that’s what I bleddy scored with!’
Previous page