This is the first post in a series titled “Introduction to Batting in Cricket: Mechanics, Visual Strategy and Psychology”. I refer the reader to the outstanding book “Modern Psychology for Cricket and Other Australian Sports” by Robert Griffiths (1999). In this area, I am known as an “instant expert” – I read one book and I think I’m a genius. I will try to do justice to Griffiths’ book.

I need to discuss the mechanics of batting before I can look at psychology. In particular, we’ll look at how batsmen watch the ball.

In recent years, scientists have studied how elite cricketers judge the flight of a cricket ball. In particular, in 2000 Mike Land and Peter McLeod, from the University of Sussex and Oxford respectively, presented a detailed study of batsmen’s eye movements when facing very fast bowling. Their conclusions are quite surprising:

“… [batsmen] monitor the moment when the ball is released, make a predictive saccade [a fast movement of the eye] to the place where they expect it to hit the ground, wait for it to bounce, and then follow the trajectory for a period of 100-200 ms after the bounce.”

Let’s break down the stages. Land and McLeod found that, for the first 0.14 seconds of the balls trajectory, elite batsmen do not follow the ball with their eyes. (We’re talking about a fast bowler here – the total time from bowler’s hand to bat is about 0.6 seconds). The eyes are stationary, fixed on the point of release, and the ball moves down through the field of vision.

The next step is called a saccade – the eyes move very rapidly to the point on the pitch where the batsman thinks the ball will bounce. There they wait until the ball arrives.

After the ball bounces, the batsman tracks the ball for the next 0.1-0.2 seconds, but not necessarily all the way onto the bat. The reason for this is quite simple: Land and McLeod note that it takes an elite batsman 0.2 seconds to adjust his shot on the basis of new information. Thus, the information gained by watching the ball in the last 0.2 seconds of its flight is useless – there isn’t enough time to incorporate that information into the trajectory of the bat. Against a fast bowler (total flight time of 0.6 seconds), this is a third of the total flight time.

Mark Waugh makes it look so easy

But how should a batsman use this information? What lessons can we take from this discovery? This will be the topic of my next post.

Introduction to Batting in Cricket: Mechanics, Visual Strategy and Psychology
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