Australia head coach Andrew McDonald has questioned the pink Dukes ball after a Test which which he feels at times “didn't even look like cricket”.
The third Test of the 2025 Frank Worrell Trophy at Kingston, Jamaica, ended inside three days as Australia ran out winners by a massive 176 runs. The final innings of that game saw the visiting quicks cause real havoc, bowling West Indies out for 27, the second-lowest total in Test cricket history.
“It's really difficult to make accurate judgments on both batting units, based upon the surfaces we played on,” McDonald said via The New Ball on SEN Radio. “You take that into the third Test, which is a pink ball, Dukes, on that surface and that game just moved way too fast and at times didn't even look like cricket.”
McDonald: Bigger question for what the pink Dukes ball looks like for Test cricket
Speaking later on about the decision to leave out spinner Nathan Lyon for the first time in over a decade, McDonald added, “Anytime you're leaving out the quality of Nathan Lyon, you'd want some some compelling information to take you down that path. And it's not too often that we have compelling information to take us down that path, but we trained for three days leading up to the Test match with the pink Dukes ball.
“We investigated what the pink Dukes ball does, in terms of data points, and it was compelling. That cricket was borderline impossible to play at certain stages. Some of those deliveries from Mitchell Starc, the way that ball behaved under lights ... and so it's a bigger question for what the pink Dukes ball looks like for Test match cricket, really.”
Of the 24 men's day-night Test matches thus far, the Kingston Test had the lowest batting average, at 11.85 runs per wicket. The India-England Test at Ahmedabad in 2021 held the previous record, at 12.23 runs per wicket.
The series as a whole saw batters score 17.68 runs per wicket, the fifth-lowest ever for any bilateral series of three-plus matches, and the lowest since Pakistan v West Indies in 1986-87 (16.93 runs per wicket).
“The expectation was that we'd get slightly flatter surfaces,” McDonald said on the conditions. “Even when we looked at that first wicket in Barbados, that played totally different to the way that we saw it presenting as well. So, we were very surprised by that surface, the way that it cracked and went up and down and the amount of seam movement.
“We do play with Dukes balls over here [in the West Indies], so that does create more seam movement by just the nature of the ball. But yeah, the surfaces did surprise. We felt like there'd be a lot more top order runs and then the games going deeper.”
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