“New balls” may be a call more familiar in tennis, but there were times last season when county cricket seemed to be echoing Wimbledon. There were games in which the ball was changed three times in an innings — the first sometimes within the opening few overs — and grounds at which a box of replacement balls was left just beyond the boundary rope to speed things up.

Naturally, the suspicions of conspiracy theorists were triggered when a wicket was taken immediately with a replacement ball. And who could blame bowling sides for querying the ball when, over time, nothing was happening for them?

Dukes balls are used in all Test and county championship matches in England. Like other ball-makers, Dukes is not slow to explain how difficult it is to guarantee a uniform ball; it is not manufacturing a product in metal or glass, infinitely reproducible.

Its product uses natural materials and is handmade. Furthermore, planned obsolescence is built into the product: the ball has to last only 80 overs in Test matches and 90 in the county game. That is inherent in the specification written by the British Standards Institution.

Do the makers protest too much? Dilip Jajodia, of Dukes, says that, to some extent, he is in the hands of the tanneries. “One cow hide will make about 35 balls. And that’s only using the best parts of the hide — not the belly, legs and so on,” he says. “So an animal with an undetected disease could be responsible for a whole batch of balls. The fact is, you don’t know that a ball is going to fail until you play with it.”

Thus, a sick cow in Devon could stop play in Derby.

Inspection of a failed ball is likely to reveal a great deal — whether, for example, one or two stitches gave way, or whether it suffered a more general failure to retain its shape. But, amazingly, Jajodia says that he never sees a failed ball. They are presumably thrown into a box for net use. This, even though a system is in place to assist follow-up, each ball coming in a small plastic bag with a unique reference number.

The assumption is that players, especially bowlers, get a new box of balls and dip into it looking for one of promising colour and (imagined) weight. It would seem that the balls are never reunited with the bags and certainly they never go back to the maker if they fail.

In this respect, cricket seems to be a bowler’s game: it is they who choose the ball, they who have special ideas about the colour. Thus, for 2005, there was an edict that balls should be of a more consistent colour to avoid the charge that some were desirably dark. As a result, a standard medium cherry red was provided. Then complaints came that balls were not dark enough.

There was talk in 2006 that a few balls were significantly harder and kept swinging throughout an innings. Darren Gough, the England fast bowler, also declared that balls were “definitely different this year”.

Jajodia said: “He knows, does he? It’s quite breathtaking. Well, it’s nonsense. There are so many factors involved, not only in the ball but between different grounds and weather conditions, including whether balls crossing the boundary hit concrete or whatever. No one ever talks to ball-makers about these things.”

No one ever talks to ball-makers about these things. It is a compelling statement. The ECB says that umpires do report in detail on the balls used in every match, that there have always been balls going out of shape and that “there weren’t an absolute truckload of them in 2006”.

Officials insist that they do talk to a number of ball-makers and are interested in a more scientific approach. The staging of ball trials is also an objective, but they are hard to organise with due scientific rectitude.

And yet it is surely an oddity that failed balls never go 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 to the fielding captain.

Explore Cricket

• Counties