Ahead of its Time
In one area, cricket has surprisingly been ahead of the curve
Sidharth Monga | January 4, 2025
Since the start of this decade, among bowlers who have bowled 50 or more full tosses in T20 cricket, Jasprit Bumrah has been hurt the least. In fact, bowlers will kill to have as their overall record the returns Bumrah has on the full toss: economy rate of 7.93 and average of 21.63. The reason is, he gets the opposite of dip on those deliveries: lift. This is why what might appear like a half-volley early in its flight ends up as a yorker. And a yorker turns into a full toss that seems to get big on the batter, which is why they are not able to take full toll.
It needed an analyst, Himanish Ganjoo in this case, to work it out, but the information was out there in the first place thanks to arguably the most significant technological innovation in sport this century: Hawk-Eye.
In the example above, the information revealed is of use to the analyst to prepare his batters for Bumrah, and to broadcasters and fans to develop a better understanding of the game. Add to it Hawk-Eye’s use in adjudication and it is hard to imagine modern cricket without it.
Hawk-Eye’s use is not limited to cricket. It is used in sports such as tennis, badminton, volleyball and football to officiate line calls, and in baseball for advanced analytics and for broadcasts.
It is rare for us to be able to say it about our sport, but this innovation that has revolutionised the consumption, analysis and adjudication of a great number of sports was originally invented for cricket by a cricketer-mathematician, Paul Hawkins, in the last couple of years of the last millennium. It was first used in a broadcast in 2001, during the Lord’s Test between England and Pakistan.
A Hawk-Eye technician measures the stumps
Ben Radford / © Getty Images
The system kept learning and kept getting refined until the ICC found it reliable enough to introduce on-field challenges against an umpire’s decision, another innovation that cricket gets better than many other sports. What we have learnt from Hawk-Eye’s projections has forced batters to change their techniques. Umpires are giving more lbws even when there are no replays available, because of what they have learnt from the technology.
Hawk-Eye is also an important tool for coaches and selectors. In a sport as dependent on luck and conditions as cricket, you need to know more than what the scoreboard can tell.
Off the field, we who don’t have intimate access to goings-on on the pitch, can gather invaluable information through Hawk-Eye’s precision cameras. Apart from the usual data on pace, seam, swing and turn, a person well equipped with knowledge of maths, science, and the handling of the data collected by the system, can tell you how quick a pitch is by the ball’s loss of pace upon pitching, the amount of dip or lift, the correlation of the dip with turn or seam, the drift produced, a bowlers’ use of different angles and release points.
Recently Bumrah bowled to Mushfiqur Rahim a delivery that was all kinds of nasty. It swung away in the air, seamed in after pitching and then, incredibly, swung away in its short path between pitching and taking the outside edge. I saw this on slow-motion replay while doing ball-by-ball commentary, which started a debate involving cricket writer Kartikeya Date. He said visual evidence can’t be trusted on such a short path. Then Date and Ganjoo used Hawk-Eye data to find out this: the ball swung away 0.321 of a degree in the air, then nipped in about 6cm and swung away about 8cm. Good luck playing that. In the end it took a thick outside edge to second slip.
Imagine what we can learn if we ask the right questions and have access to Hawk-Eye data.
Sidharth Monga is a senior writer at ESPNcricinfo
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.
