Section:GDN 1N PaGe:35 Edition Date:190821 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 20/8/2019 18:28 cYanmaGentaYellowb
Wednesday 21 Au g u st 2019 The Guardian •
35Speed of thought
Fast bowlers have
not hit a new peak,
- they have just
reached a plateau
A
t 96mph the ball travels from the
bowler to the batsman in the bat of an
eyelid. Really. At that speed a batsman
has around 0.4sec to play with which,
most studies seem to agree, also
happens to be how long it takes to
blink. But that 0.4sec is only a fag-
packet calculation. The true number
would allow for the ball’s de celeration and its journey
down into the pitch and up away from it, but still, we are
dealing with the tiny margins , tenths and hundredths,
that a batsman has to spot the length, the line, make up
his mind, and then play a shot. So near the top of the
accelerometer, cricket begins to seem almost physically
impossible.
At that speed strange things start to happen, for the
batsm an, the bowler, and the spectators. Time begins
to both speed up and slow down, as though someone’s
sitting on the remote. Our sense of it gets elastic. On
Saturday Steve Smith, who, with his Heath Robinson
batting technique, usually seems to have so much time
to work in, was all of a sudden so short of it he could not
even make it halfway through a shot before the ball was
on him. And then when he fell, everything slowed right
down again, as the crowd fell silent and minds fi lled with
a fl ood of awful thoughts.
The diff erence between the half-second before the
ball hit him and the half-second afterwards could be
measured in minutes.
In the rush, everything bec ame a little blurry and
uncertain and frantic. Right after, everyone was
wondering when, if ever, an Englishman had ever
bowled quicker, and speculating about who, if anyone,had ever made a better debut. Again, then, our minds
were playing games. It was only six months ago that
Mark Wood was bowling 95mph against West Indies in
St Lucia, when he took fi ve for 41. And there was another
fast bowler in this very same Test, Pat Cummins, who
swept away South Africa with six for 79 in Johannesburg
when he was an 18-year-old tearaway playing his fi rst
match in 2011.
So it’s not just the batsmen who stop thinking clearly.
The spectators do too. We get so worked up about what’s
in front of us we cannot believe it was ever any better.
There is a school of thought that bowlers are bound to
be faster now, simply because of the advances in sport
science , strength and conditioning. Records progress,
the argument goes. Except no one has come within 20cm
of Mike Powell’s long jump world record in almost 30
years and Seb Coe still holds the British 800m record set
in 1981 , and the time Jim Hines ran in the 1968 Olympic
100m fi nal would have won him bronze at the world
championships in 2017 in a dead heat with Usain Bolt.I
n baseball, the fastest recorded pitch was thrown
by Aroldis Chapman, 105.1mph, in 2010 but
retrospective analysis has shown Nolan Ryan
was pitching nearly as quick in 1974 and Bob
Feller was not so far behind in 1946. Pitchers
have been throwing at 100mph for almost 100
years. There are no great leap forwards left to
make.
In cricket, the fastest ball is still Shoaib Akhtar’s to
Nick Knight during Pakistan’s match against England in
the 2003 World Cup. But Knight played it like he faced
it hundreds of times before and even Shoaib admitted
there is some scepticism about the measurement. You
cannot really trust the speed guns, when during this
same Lord’s Test one of Archer’s loopy knuckle balls got
clocked at 90mph.
Scientists have tried to get more precise
measurements. A study done in 1976 clocked Jeff
Thompson’s top speed at 99.8mph, and Michael
Holding’s at 95.2mph, but then another, just three
years later had Thompson at 91.8mph and Holding at
87.76mph. Back before that Frank Tyson, likely the
fastest England ever had, remembered being tested
at New Zealand’s Aeronautical College in Wellington
in 1955. “We bowled in two or three sweaters,” Tyson
said, “and I cannot vouch for the length of our run-ups.”
Tyson says he was clocked at 89mph,
from a strolling start.
Tyson knew as much about fast
bowling as anyone. “He fell into the
particularly modern pattern of the
sportsman who, by taking thought,
has added a cubit to his athletic
stature,” wrote John Arlott. “He
applied an academically trained brain
to sport and, beginning from the basic
principles of bowling, analysed his
physical assets and exploited them to
maximum eff ect.”
As a player, writer, scholar,
and coach, Tyson made a lifelong
study of both the art and science of
fast bowling. He became an early
evangelist for biomechanics. But in
the end, right towards the end of his life, he still believed
“the only true judge of a bowler’s speed is the batsman
himself ”.
The truth is that, just as in baseball, there has always
been a small number of men who are able to bowl right
up above 95mph. It’s not a peak but a plateau and up
there everything gets subjective and dependent on
a wild number of variables. Not just the predictable
ones, like the batsman’s ability, and their familiarity
with the bowler’s action, the pitch and the atmospheric
conditions, but more ephemeral things too. Perhaps
the batsman has happened to catch the bowler in a bad
mood ; maybe, like Smith did, he just made the mistake
of thrashing him through cover for four. They are all fast,
who is fastest depends on who you were unlucky enough
to face and where and when it happened.Andy Bull
There is a
school of
thought
bowlers
are bound
to be faster
now, simply
because of
advances
in sport
science▲ Jofra Archer’s, Michael Holding’s and Frank Tyson’s
pace make cricket seem almost physically impossible
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