This is the Friends of History Debating Society. I'm John Bachelor learning cricket and cricket's time of year from Jeremy Zackerson, New South Wales.

This is about Australia playing cricket in England in something called white cricket.

What is that, Jeremy?

Well, white cricket is actually referring to the color of the ball as a white ball series of cricket and white cricket

are cricket games that have played completely within the space of only a day so

that the beginning of the game starts at the beginning of the day and regardless

of what happens towards the end if say that the game starts at the beginning of the day and regardless of what happens towards the end

if say that the game is delayed by rain or something else happens to the pitch during the day,

at the end of the day the complete game is finished, you know a score, you know who's won. And the reason that they actually

use a white ball, believe it or not, was because in the 80s when they started to play this form of

cricket, which is different to the test series, which goes over many many days you can stop early in the

afternoon if you need to and start the next day but what they used to find is

that to complete a game sometimes you'd have to do it in a little bit of darkness

under lights and what they found was the red balls were actually not easy

to see as that the lights came on and the darkness came in. So what they did was they moved

to a white ball which funnily enough works very well in daylight, but as soon as those

bright lights at the stadium come in and there's a bit of a dark backdrop come in as well, you can still

see those balls quite clearly, especially if they popped up into the outfield.

So Whiteball cricket jones really just by sheer practicality

in the fact that as it gets a bit darker

and you have to keep playing cricket,

that's the only ball you can actually see.

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