Googly wrote: ↑Thu Dec 05, 2019 6:03 amA must read for any cricketer or coach is Bob Woolmer’s book- The Art and Science of Cricket of Cricket. It’s about 800 pages and it’s simply magnificent. The man was deeply thoughtful and smart.
Anyway there’s a few pages there dedicated to watching the ball out of the hand. They’d hooked up some contraption onto various batsmen’s heads and could deduce how carefully they tracked the ball. Not one batsman focused on the ball for the entire time, the mediocre ones only tracked the ball intensely for about 50% of its flight and the really good batters for little over 70%.
Peter Kirsten was involved in an experiment where the ball passed through a beam about 4 meters from release that plunged the net into darkness. It turned out that was all the cues he needed and he could play the shot with ease at 130 kph. Basically the very best get all their info within the first split second, hence the expression “he’s got lots of time.” You can teach it up to a point- just hit lots of balls, the rest is God given. I’ve done a similar thing with a few good kids where I tell them to close their eyes after I throw and they can all more or less hit it fairly consistently off a concrete deck.
My point being it’s probably less about reactions than hand eye coordination and an early read.
The interesting thing is that 22 yards and 135 kph is where most normal people are at their limit. Once you start getting past 140 there’s only a small handful that remain technically sound. It’s hard to tell how much of that is a person realizing that this red thing may actually kill them if they get it wrong as opposed to an ability thing.
You find that a greater portion of really good batsmen are fairly small guys with fast reactions though. It certainly used to be the case, with notable exceptions, but these days guys are just getting bigger and bigger.
It would be interesting to get good
batters to do that hand slapping thing that drunk blokes do in a bar to see if they had better reactions than most, and if the small guys were faster than the oafs.
I had a very interesting conversation with my mate a few weeks ago about eye domination ie which eye was dominant. His theory was that most left handers were right eye dominant and this is why there were so many good lefties around. His reason being that that was the eye ever so slightly in front. Most right handers are right eye dominant, that eye being slightly behind at set up and contact and interestingly I’ve asked a couple of really good right handers which is their dominant eye and a disproportionate number are left eye dominant, which is unusual.
I wonder if Makoni knows any of this stuff?