A cricket ball is a hard, solid ball used to play cricket. Cricket balls are made from a core of cork, which is layered with tightly wound string, and covered by a leather case with a slightly raised sewn seam.
The covering is made of four pieces of leather shaped similar to the peel of a quartered orange, but one half is rotated by 90 degrees with respect to the other.
The ‘equator’ of the ball is stitched with string to form the seam, with a total of six rows of stitches. The remaining two joints between the leather pieces are left unstitched. For men’s cricket, the ball must weigh between 156 and 163.0 grams and measure between 22.4 and 22.9 cm in circumference.
Cricket balls are traditionally dyed red, and red balls are used in Test cricket and First-class cricket. White balls were introduced when one-day matches began being played at night under floodlights, as they are more visible at night.
Many one-day matches are played with white balls. Other colours have been experimented with, such as yellow and orange for improved night visibility, but the colouring process has rendered such balls unsuitable for professional play because they wear differently from standard balls.
The white ball has been found to swing a lot more during the first half of the innings than the red ball. It also deteriorates faster than the red ball. A new, highly polished ball is used at the start of each innings in a match.
A new cricket ball is harder than a worn one, and is preferred by fast bowlers because of the speed and bounce of the ball as it bounces off the pitch. Older balls tend to spin more as the roughness grips the pitch more when the ball bounces, so spin bowlers prefer to use a worn ball.