The devastating science of 90mph bowling: So quick you are effectively blind

First, Kevin Sinclair fell to the ground. Then, he had to walk off the pitch, suffering the twin ignominy of physical pain and being dismissed.

Just before 5:30pm on Sunday afternoon, Mark Wood sprinted across the Trent Bridge turf, accelerated into the crease and released a bouncer. Sinclair, West Indies’ No 7, shaped to evade the ball as it speared into his ribs. Instead, a sharp blow to the wrist knocked Sinclair off his feet. As he fell, the Nottingham crowd could immediately detect that here was Test cricket at its most primal – batsmen battling not merely the threat to their wickets but palpable physical danger too.

Facing speeds at 90mph, a batsman has 0.45 seconds between the ball leaving the hand and playing their shot – and even less time when it is quicker. There are 22 yards between the two sets of stumps; the batsman, standing in front of his wickets, is about 18 yards away when the bowler delivers the ball from the popping crease.

Following the ball’s release, batsmen have to make a myriad of decisions: where the ball will pitch; how it will bounce; whether it will swing in the air before pitching; whether it will seam off the pitch after it lands. Then, they either play their shot, leave the ball or – if the delivery is speared towards their body – sway away from the ball. To make effective contact with the ball, the margin of error is infinitesimal: batsmen must judge the ball’s position to within three centimetres and the time it reaches them to within three milliseconds.

Good luck.

Batsmen do not even get the luxury of 0.45 seconds to decide what shot to play against 90mph bowling. Instead, they have 0.25-0.3 seconds to adjust to the ball trajectory and commit to their shots.

For the last 150 milliseconds of the ball’s journey, the equivalent of one-third of the pitch, batters are effectively blind. By this point it is too late to make any adjustment, explains David Mann, an associate professor at the University of Amsterdam who has conducted extensive research with Australian Test cricketers. This is why a ball that moves late or bounces up unpredictably, like Wood’s delivery to Sinclair, is so devastating.

And so, for all the physical threat posed by pace, and the courage that players must summon, the greatest challenge for batsmen is simply working out where the ball is going to be.

“Every delivery is a process of accumulating evidence about where the ball’s going to arrive, and how it’s going to arrive,” Mann explains. Batsmen use information “before the ball is even released from the body cues of the bowler” – from their face, shoulder, arm and their instincts – to deduce where the ball is likely to be.

About 100 milliseconds before a ball is released, batsmen look at where they predict the ball will be delivered from. While wearing occlusion goggles that block their vision at the moment that the ball is released, studies have shown that elite players still tend to move in the right direction of the ball – sometimes even managing to hit it.

The importance of such cues is why facing bowling machines with the speed ramped up is only limited preparation, Mann says. “You can bump the ball machine up and face that pace, but then you miss out on those pre-release cues that get you in position early enough.”

A particularly important cue is when the ball is released. “If a fast bowler’s going to bowl a bouncer, obviously he delivers the ball later because he’s got to bowl shorter,” Australia’s Mike Hussey once said.

While preparing using pre-delivery cues, batsmen then use information in the ball’s flight – about its line, length, and whether it swings before pitching – to ascertain where the ball will be when it meets their bat and the shot that they need to play. After the ball is released, Mann says, “the more information you give them in the ball flight, the closer they’ll be to hitting it properly.”

Each delivery, batsmen essentially make two predictions informed by tracking the ball in its flight, Mann explains. First, where the ball is going to bounce. Second, where they are going to make contact with the ball.

The faster the bowling, the earlier that batsmen must make their predictions before deciding upon their shot – and so the less accurate they are likely to be. “When you’re facing a faster bowler like Mark Wood, you’re having to make a decision earlier essentially with less information to give you a precise idea of where it’s going to be,” Mann notes. Shaping up to play a shot, he has found the latest time that any batsman can make any minor adjustment – say to the angle of their bat, with it already too late to change what stroke they are playing – is about 100 milliseconds, the equivalent of about seven yards before the ball reaches a batsman.

The best players of pace process the cues about what a ball is likely to do quicker and more accurately. Then, they have the nous and instinct to act on it more effectively, using their hand-eye coordination to get into position to play their shot rapidly. And they have a process that is reliable and repeatable.

“They’re just like clockwork – they’re so well-trained and so accurate with their predictions,” Mann says. “They’re incredibly consistent with the nuances of their eyes and head. Developing players have a lot more variability.”

At the point of release, batsmen keep their heads still to watch the ball. “The eyes do very little work,” Mann reflects. “It’s actually the head that does everything.” Australian Test batsmen he studied “tracked the ball perfectly with their head, essentially to the point where their nose would be pointing at the ball the whole way. We’ve got this funny thing in cricket, where we say ‘watch the ball and keep your head still’. Most of the tracking is done with the head.”

Science has revealed other misconceptions about what it takes to face elite fast bowling. Reaction times for elite batsmen are also not unusually quick, Mann has shown. “But if you take the time that it takes them to move their feet based on a delivery in cricket then they’re a hell of a lot quicker than us.”

He has also found that batsmen’s average eyesight is simply in line with that of the general population; Don Bradman’s poor eyesight stopped him from serving in the Australian army during the Second World War.

In studies using goggles, Mann has blurred the vision of batsmen facing pace bowling. Remarkably, he has found that batsmen need to be legally blind before it decreases their performance.

“Batters would put them on and say ‘I can’t see a thing, I’m really scared,’ but then they go in and hit it much better than they expect,” Mann recalls. He believes that “the visual system that we use for hitting intercepting objects is based on an earlier evolved form of vision that doesn’t rely on very fine visual acuity.”

What distinguishes the best players of pace bowling, then, isn’t their reaction times or their eyes. But this only makes their ability to identify cues, making complex decisions in the blink of an eye, even more remarkable.