The ongoing round of the 2025 County Championship has seen records tumble for batting over the first innings of games, with the use of the Kookaburra ball as opposed to the usual Dukes pinpointed as a key factor in the volume of runs scored across the country.
What records have been broken in round nine of the 2025 County Championship?
Collectively, across both the Division One and Two competitions, more than 4,500 runs have been scored in the first innings of the round. That's an all-time record for the number of first-innings runs scored in the same round in County Championship history.
There have also been individual team records broken in matches, the most notable case being at The Oval, where Surrey piled on 820 runs against Durham across days one and two. Their 820-9 declared surpassed their previous record for runs scored in a single County Championship innings, which was 811 set in 1899. It wasn't quite an outright record for runs scored by any team in a Championship innings, with Yorkshire's record of 887 still standing. At one point in their innings, Surrey were 612-3.
Elsewhere, Worcestershire piled on 679 runs against Hampshire before declaring seven wickets down, both Jake Libby and Adam Hose scoring double-hundreds. Warwickshire also put on 415 against Sussex before being bowled out, with Sussex 390 only four wickets down in response.
8⃣2⃣0⃣ - 9⃣
— Wisden (@WisdenCricket) July 1, 2025
Surrey broke their County Championship record with a huge first-innings total against Durham, led by one triple hundred and three other centuries 👏#Countycricket2025 #DomSibley pic.twitter.com/4wvStMUedo
Why have there been so many runs scored in this round?
There are several factors which go into why runs have flowed so easily and wickets have been hard to come by in this round. The most controversial factor is the use of the Kookaburra ball, which all teams up and down the country are required to use this week. Cricket in England is usually played with a Dukes ball, with that ball being preferred in international and domestic cricket. However, the Kookaburra is now used for periods of the County Championship.
The Kookaburra differs from the Dukes ball as it has a flatter seam and tends to go softer quicker. This means that seam and swing bowlers find it hard to extract movement off the surface and through the air, while pacers struggle to generate bounce off the pitch. Thus, the ball becomes less threatening to batters.
There's also the conditions to consider. England has been going through a heatwave over the weekend and into the early week, with temperatures in parts of the country over 30 degrees Celsius. With no cloud cover or moisture in the pitches, bowlers have had further challenges to produce wicket-taking deliveries with a more challenging ball than normal. Equally, June in the UK was one of the hottest on record, with pitches and outfields baked, making them harder and less likely to break up for spinners, and meaning outfields are lightning fast.
Why is the Kookaburra ball being used in the 2025 County Championship?
Using the Kookaburra for a short period in the County Championship was trialled in two early rounds of the season in 2023, which was increased to four last year by adding rounds in September. However, after only one result was achieved and 16,817 runs were scored in the first two rounds of the 2024 competition, it was scheduled for rounds nine-12 this year.
The move to using the Kookaburra ball in the Championship was recommended by Andrew Strauss's High Performance Review in 2022. The review was commissioned in the wake of England's defeat in the 2021/22 Ashes in Australia, and set out changes that needed to be made in the English game to return to the pinnacle of the sport across all formats. One of it's key findings was the absence of high pace bowling and quality spin across domestic cricket in England, with the Dukes ball favouring movement over pace.
The review said: "We aren't encouraging the development of the 'extreme' skills required to success in international cricket."
It proposed a pilot scheme of using the Kookaburra ball to "test the impact on bowlers' skills and development". With the Kookaburra widely used in overseas international cricket, it was also aimed at getting bowlers used to the ball before coming through for England.
Increasing the number of rounds which use the Kookaburra was lauded as "fantastic" by Rob Key last year. “You see what four-day cricket is meant to be," said Key. "I’ve watched quite a bit this week and seen some bloody good cricket. I would use the Kookaburra all the time. English cricket would be much better off for it.”
However, the move has been less enthusiastically greeted by others. Speaking last year, Surrey high-performance advisor Alec Stewart described it as "the worst decision ever", while speaking last week, Yorkshire head coach Anthony McGrath said it was "nonsensical".
In the afternoon of day three of the ongoing round of fixtures, no Division One team has made it into their second innings.
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