Balls..

What lasts for roughly a day of cricket takes over 75 days to create. It is what goes inside a ball that consumes time. The very core of a cricket ball is a grey-brown ball of cork-rubber. Workers, with narrow sheets of cork and string lying about them, create these cores. They wrap small, flat strips of cork around the grey-brown cork-rubber ball, and then a wet wool string around the composition tightly until it is mummified. This is laid in a wooden bowl and pummelled into a sphere with a wooden hammer.

This process is repeated, with further layers of cork and string - five in all.

Cherry pickin’

And yet, it is surely an oddity that failed balls never come back to the manufacturer. Indeed, one might think that this highly regulated professional sport - in such turmoil about the possibility of tampering - would wish to have its officials in charge of the balls from the moment they are released by the manufacturers to the moment they are handed over to the fielding captain.

Cow corner

I asked if there was a limit on how much balls could bounce back. Yes, they said, a foot and ten inches; anything more than that would be deemed illegal. This was amazing, and I told them: pitches in Australia were already the sort that encouraged bounce, and yet their balls rebounded three more inches than an SG ball? The SG ball could bounce seven inches more before it was deemed illegal. So why didn't they use a different material inside the ball to make the ball bounce more?

It is an interesting thought - instead of importing Kookaburra balls (there werent enough last year and they wore out pretty quickly), why not modify the existing SG balls as Rahul Bhatia has suggested?

These new balls will be strictly for domestic cricket (including games between visiting and domestic teams) until they gain currency on the international stage.

The BCCI could facilitate a channel between the ball manufacturers and the players, thus allowing for enhancements and/or improvements

Now that is a Committee worth constituting :)
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And on a slightly different note, this

That showed that the first-class players are still scared to voice their opinion in front of others, fearing retribution from their state associations, and even though the administrators present agreed that there are some associations which are being run like personal fiefdoms, there is not much the BCCI can do about it, unless some person uses the PIL method to ensure that there is a regular change in these associations.

Worth a read.