Technologies-Bowling machine

What is a bowling machine, and how does it work? A bowling machine is a device that functions as a nets bowler, firing balls at batsmen, providing them with practice. The machine can simulate various types of pace, swing, and spin bowling accurately. The main mechanism in a mechanical bowling machine (the most common kind) consists of two spinning wheels, each driven by its own motor, between which the balls are fed via a chute. The device is mounted on a tripod or similar, at such a height as to simulate the delivery of a bowler of average height. The machine runs on rechargeable batteries; each charge provides between two and six hours of running time. swing and spin-- Swing is produced by varying the speeds of the wheels independently using a manual controller - i.e., speeding one wheel up and slowing the other one down, which produces an effect similar to that caused when a football is kicked with the outer part of the foot. The ball swerves away from the faster wheel. To impart spin, in addition to having the wheels move at different speeds, the machine head is tilted and then swing rotation is put on the ball. The ball turns because the rotation is at an angle when it hits the ground. The length of deliveries can be adjusted by tilting the head of the machine as required. The speed can be varied from 20mph to 95mph. The bowling machine is most accurate with a round object, and cricket balls are not perfectly round. Moreover, cricket balls are made of leather, which is prone to tearing when squeezed between the spinning wheels. This is why hard polyurethane balls - dimpled for swing - are used. An advance over the mechanical version is the programmable bowling machine, which can be configured to bowl different types of deliveries in sequence. A programmable bowling machine called Merlyn, which it was claimed could bowl any ball known to man, including Shane Warne's legbreaks, was in the news when it was used by England in the run-up to their successful 2005 Ashes campaign. More common are pneumatic bowling machines, which use a pump to provide a flow of air that propels the ball through a tube at varying speeds.

Technologies- Hawk eye

Hawk-Eye is a computer system used in cricket, tennis to visually track the path of the ball and display a record of its actual path as graphic image. In tennis, it is now part of the adjudication process used by umpires during referrals. It is used as a part of referals in cricket of late..
It has the ability to predict the future path of a ball. England, Australia, India, South Africa, West Indies, Pakistan, Sri Lanka are the nations were Hawk-Eye has been implemented... The technology was also in place at the ICC Champions Trophy in 2006 and the 2007 World Cup in the West Indies. The technology is used by broadcasters to resolve LBW shouts and show whether a batsman should have been given ‘not-out’ or ‘out’: the technology predicts the path of the ball as it comes out of the bounce, thus determining whether the ball would have hit the stumps...

Assessing LBWs

• Would the ball have hit the stumps?
• Did the ball pitch in-line?
• Did the ball hit the batsman in-line?

Wagon Wheels

The singles, 2s, 3s, 4s and 6s that make up quick-fire 50s or vital centuries are represented by the different colours on the Wagon Wheel, which shows the areas of the field that the batsman has been targeting.Nowadays, the grounds do look realistic and resemble the actual ground..

Spin / Swing

Hawk-Eye also demonstrates how far a delivery has deviated after pitching.Actual delivery and a delivery to show if the ball had not spun or deviated is showed.

 

 

Pitch Maps

Pitch maps show where the bowler has pitched the ball.. How good the bowler was in a spell or how good he was to a right handed or left-handed batsmen can be analyzed..
Beehives show where the ball has passed the batsman.

Ball Speeds and bounce

Ball speeds is shown, where a top delivery is compared with a slow ball to show how slow the ball has been bowled. Also, it can be used to check the bounce the actual ball compared to what if the ball had normal bounce..

Still the experts are of the view that Hawk Eye may not be able to predict the ball coming out from the rough on a 5th day wicket and from the cracks on the wickets.. It cannot be used as a supplement to umpiring decisions in LBWs because you may end up giving more 'out' than 'not-out' with the hawk eye showing that the ball may have kissed the leg-stump or just clipped the bails.. This was in trial in the champions trophy in Sri-Lanka if i am not wrong.. Created havoc by breaking the flow of the game and disrupting the innings.. (Don't tell it to Modi, he may slip in a couple of ads in that time)..

Technologies- Hot spot

The recent innovation used in cricket claims to be 100% effective in detecting edges ! It is basically used in Channel 9's cricket coverage.. It was first used in the Ashes series in Australia. It uses infrared camera technology to determine whether a batsman has made contact with a delivery, and if so, which part of his bat or body made contact.

Two powerful thermal-imaging cameras are positioned above the field of play, behind the bowler's arm at either end of a ground. These can remotely sense and measure the minute amount of heat generated by the impact of a cricket ball against another object. Computer technology then generates a negative image on which the point of contact is highlighted as a red friction "hot spot" for a second or two. HotSpot doesn't only record impacts between the ball and other objects, but also the bat hitting a pad or the ground.
So any impact is spotted as a white dot / white line on the bat or pad or the human body.. So it perfectly tells the commentators (so far, hopefully umpires in the future) whether the batsman is out or not and they can go gaga over it.. HotSpot is therefore useful in instances of bat-pad impacts in determining whether the ball hit bat or pad first and if implemented can reduce a lot of human errors.

HotSpot uses technology developed in the military for tank- and jet-fighter tracking. The technology was adapted for television by BBG Sports, the Australian company responsible for the Snickometer, in conjunction with Sky Sports. Channel Nine producer Steve Crawley described HotSpot as "100% backed up by science", as opposed to other applications. 




Hot Spot has particular advantage of over it competing technology, the Snickometer which is a sound-detection based system. Snickometer often produces inconclusive results indicating contact (potentially any combination of bat, pad and ball) only, whereas the Hot Spot clearly show exactly what the ball strikes.




In short, it is a good technology that is used only by the channel 9.. It would be good if the other broadcasters also use it.. IF (IF) the ICC are serious about introducing technology to reduce human errors in umpiring decisions, then instead of wasting time with referrals and hawk eyes, they can implement HotSpot.. This is surely less ambiguous than hawk eyes that are used in the referral system now..