Why Barbar Azam makes batting look easy
Have you heard cricket commentators use the phrase “He has so much time to play the shot”, well if you watched Barbar Azam from Pakistan, or Dananjaya de Silva from Sri Lanka bat recently you will know what they are talking about. Its almost as if the ball stops for a moment for a selfie with the batsman just before the bat comes down and hits it with amazing grace. In this article I’m going to bring in a physics explanation of what that means, and in the process bust another phrase that is used in commentary often : “Watch the ball into the bat”
Lets start with the math..
The cricket pitch is 22 yards ( Its a British Game ), or roughly 20m. If you are not facing Brett Lee , Jeff Archer, Shoab Aktar etc then normally a “Fast” bowler would be bowling at around 144 kmph or 40m/s. Assuming the velocity of the ball doesn't change (I don't want to use calculus here) we can calculate that the ball will travel the length of the pitch in 0.5 seconds (500ms). Lets park that for a moment.
The human nerves can transmit information at an amazing rate. Modern research suggest that they can be as fast as 1000 times per second. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that our brain processes 1000 frames per second. One reason for that is that the brain will only process as much information as it needs to. So there are studies such as this one that say that brain only needs as less as 13ms to process an information frame. But there are some flaws in that research as well such as the incentive given to the brain to process that information (we all know when we start pumping adrenaline, time kind of freezes), which I am not going to go into here. So given all these I would suggest that we will process a frame somewhere between 5ms (200fps) to 100ms (10fps). And if we were to predict something like the trajectory of an moving object we would do that in 50ms.
Which brings us back to the number of times a batsman would need to “see” the ball before deciding where it is going to be when it nears him. According to our previous calculation we have 500ms in which we can calculate this 10 times. Coming back to Barbar Azam and why he seems to have so much time, do you think this is because:
1. His brain is able to calculate the trajectory using a lesser number of calculations than others
2. His brain is capable of doing more number or calculations than others
One part of being able to play the ball is to get your body into position quickly. So the quicker you conclude where the ball is going the faster you can tell your muscles (which are way slower than the neurons) to start moving. So a batsman who seems to have time to play the ball makes this prediction with a lesser number of sighting of the ball. His brain is also able to then stop wasting processing power on the intermediatory states of the ball and also ask his eyes to move to the expected point of contact for the ball and start watching for the ball to appear in that position. This allows for the great timing as well as the brain to think about shot selection using those freed up processing power. So in effect the batsman is not deciding on a shot watching the ball closely right into the bat but adjusting (or aborting) the pre selected shot based on the reinforcement of knowing the ball has arrived at the expected position and that his prediction was correct.
There are flaws in this whole process however when the ball seams off the pitch or there is late swing. Because the batsman has concluded what the ball is going to do by looking at its first few frames after it was released by the bowler, in the event it hits the pitch and changes its trajectory he can only abort the shot. This is why Barbar or Dhananjaya are culpable to dismissals where the ball seams early on in their innings and gets the outside edge of the bat or gets leg before. During these times they need to go into survival mode and be a little less lazy and start watching the ball longer like other batsman do.
So how does one train to become a Barbar Azam? Well you have to train yourself to disregard watching the ball in the middle of pitch. This part is totally unimportant. Unless of course the pitch is not true and there is variable bounce. There are several techniques to do this. But that I leave for people making money out of coaching.
