Considered as one of the worst ball ever made for the world cup, the Jabulani has made some serious headlines during this time’s event. Many considered the Jabulani to be ‘hard to control’, and a lot had blamed it on the results.

Experts claimed that the Jabulani to be too round to fly straight, causing it to have erratic flight course waypoint. Therefore, the Adidas-made ball has been under a serious drubbing, even by the players.

Spain’s Iker Casillas has dissed it as “rotten,” while Italy’s top goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon tagged it “unpredictable”. Julio Cesar of Brazil suggested he could do better buying a ball in a supermarket.

This may be due to how the Jabulani is made. “The stitches of the Jabulani are internal, so the ball resembles a perfect sphere,” said Eric Berton, deputy director of the Institute of the Science of Movement in Marseille, France.

Other sports like tennis, golf, or baseball have irregularities precisely to insure a more stable and controlled trajectory. The ridges or exposed seams are what make possible spin in tennis or a curveball pitch in baseball. Ask a decent tennis player, and they can show you ways of controlling the projectile of the ball by means of spins and direction of hits.

Despite the Jabulani’s so-called “grip’n'groove” concept however, the ball apparently doesn’t behave in the same way. The Jabulani is made of eight thermally-bonded polyurethane panels, and is very nearly waterproof.

“Because of the shape, the time of contact with the foot is reduced,” said Berton.

“As a consequence, it practically doesn’t spin. The ball travels a little less far, and will have a floating and unpredictable trajectory, whether for a striker or a goalkeeper,” he said.

Kazuya Seo of Yamagata and Takeshi Asai University in Tsukuba , researchers from Japan also tested the Jabulani in wind-tunnel and found that the machine-made Jabulani was close to a perfect sphere, actually too close to similar a sphere, therefore has a tendency to slow suddenly in mid-flight – a disconcerting characteristic for footballers. Derek Leinweber, an Australian scientist based at Adelaide University, also conducted a series of computer-stimulated tests and concluded that the ball goes faster and is more unpredictable. “That means the goalkeeper can no longer really anticipate its trajectory,” he said.

However, Fifa has said differently in regards to the new Jabulani – which means “to celebrate” in isiZulu — “allows for maximum control, stable flight and perfect grip under all conditions.”

Due to the controversy, Adidas has also stepped up in defending its product. “There are strict Fifa guidelines on the ball (weight, size, bounce depending on what the temperature is),” commented the German company. “Not only does our ball fulfill all these conditions but in fact they go beyond them.

I guess that’s the problem with the Jabulani. It’s engineered ‘to go beyond’ the design guideline, that’s causing all the trouble.

[via Mail & Guardian Online]