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When the first few New Zealand wickets fell cheaply on the first morning at Edgbaston, there were already worried faces among administrators fearing an early finish and the loss of ticket sales.

Meanwhile, Dickie Bird was checking on paltry scores in the Yorkshire match at Leicester fearing that he would miss his free lunch on the Saturday as guest of his old county.

I was among a hundred or more former Test players who were not able to enjoy hospitality offered by the England and Wales Cricket Board scheduled for the Sunday at the Test match and, ever since, the argument continues about the reasons for such a concerted clatter of wickets.

Was it the pitch? Was it the heavy atmosphere? Was it plain incompetent batting or a combination of all three? Or was it anything to do with the Duke cricket balls selected for use by the board?

This selection process by the home authority is a fairly recent innovation, because it was less than 10 years ago that I remember the England captain wanting to use the Duke ball and the West Indians plumping for the Reader version.

England's priority was swing as opposed to seam movement expected by the visitors. In a five-Test series, whoever won the toss of a coin had the ball of their choice for three of them.

Interestingly, the white ball used throughout the recent World Cup was also of Duke manufacture with a reputation for moving around more than the red version.

The suggestion that seams have become more prominent again, going back to the wilder versions of the late 1980s, is refuted categorically by John Carr, director of cricket operations of the ECB.

He told me: ``Both Dukes and Readers conform to the current BSI Licence provisions [there is one other licensee named Oxbridge]. The twine for the seams is imported from Barber Campbell in Ireland and is restricted to a nine-strand thread. The only difference is that the thread has to be died black for the white balls, which may give the appearance of being thicker.''

Despite his general assurances, there remains concern at headquarters that purely random batch sampling - as is the current arrangement may not be stringent enough. It may be that umpires will be asked to physically weigh and measure every ball before use, which may be no bad thing.

The theory is that with a choice of balls left to the captains at county level, there is a pre-disposition to the ball which feels smaller in the bowler's hand and thus pressure is put on these two competing manufacturers to please their customers.

One way is to make the ball so it is just the seam that conforms to the two-ring test (able to pass through one ring and not through the other) so that the ball is not actually round, so much as two discs joined together.

Looking at balls from the pre-war period - some say the Golden Age of the game - they certainly seem bigger and rounder than the modern version. It is hard to know whether they have changed shape over the intervening years, but advertisements in Wisden of 1929 show the Duke ball (makers to the MCC!) to be particularly spherical with hardly any seam showing proud of the leather.

Pity the faster bowlers of the day. No wonder they all talked about the amount of ``work'' they put on the ball rather than which way it might deviate naturally. The word ``seamer'' is of relatively recent origin.

Another advert was for Wisden's ``special crown'' balls, used in Test and first-class county matches and in the Australia v England 1928-29 series. And, a new name to me, there was the ``Harlequin'' ball, whose excellence was apparently due to ``the cork and worsted quilt being built up by our patent process in perfectly uniform layers''.

Times change and both of these manufacturers have faded away. If you play for the Ashes in Australia these days, it will

be with the Kookaburra ball, which is machine-stitched, lasts better on their harder pitches, but could be too much in the fast bowlers' favour if used in English conditions.

It is not only a matter of making the ball roughly right for local conditions, such as the rock-hard lumps we played with in up-country matches in India and Pakistan in the Sixties. They knocked lumps off our English willow bats to the extent that we had to buy locally-grown ``English'' willow versions, stripping them of all face decoration to avoid upsetting our home bat sponsors.

There is still the whole matter of what bowlers and fielders can legally, and not so legally, do to the ball once they get their hands on it. It has always been a fine line between a bit of sweat to maintain the shine as opposed to a good soaking to develop reverse swing. Picking the seam seems to be less in the news these days, though I doubt that it is entirely a thing of the past.

I came across a new angle in a confidential report the other day, but it was confirmed to me by the informative John Carr as a current ploy. ``In some situations, a softer ball makes it harder for the batsman to get it off the square,'' he said. ``Fielders can accelerate the softening by bouncing all their throws to the keeper - and it can develop reverse swing more quickly, too.''

What will the wily gentlemen of cricket come up with next? Hopefully, nothing to reduce the Lord's Test to a two-day bun-fight!