Building better cricketers

I'm at the practice nets under the Members' Stand at the MCG, watching Australia's fastest bowler of all time. He keeps missing the stumps.

He's Shaun Tait (32), who in 2010 bowled the second-fastest ball ever recorded by a bowler 161 km/h (100.1 miles/h) against England at Lords in 2010 (watch it here). Only Pakistan's Shoaib Akhtar (161.3 km/h against England in 2004) has bowled faster, at least in modern times when speed can be accurately clocked.

Tait also holds the record for the fastest ball bowled in Australia, edging out everyone from Jeff Thomson, Australia (160.6 km/h in 1976 against the West Indies at the WACA) to the king of the World Cup 2015 speedsters, Mitchell Johnson (156.8 km/h).

In 2007, the South Australian paceman seemed to have the world at this feet.

But it wasn't to be. A series of shoulder and elbow injuries contributed to a patchy international career. Today, he plays for T20 side the Hobart Hurricanes in Australia's Big Bash league.

But back to the MCG in 2015. Tait is being recorded by several cameras, plus some my iPhone 6 Plus in slo-mo mode (see clip below).

If you look closely you'll see he's got a smartphone strapped to his left arm. He was accidentally on-purpose bowling off-target to give some data worth analysing.

Also on-hand is Sydney University cricket biomechanics researcher Dr Eduard Rene Ferdinands, who specialises in motion analysis and dynamics modelling, and Dr Oren Tosh, who consults on 3-dimensional motion analysis. 

Wearables and cameras are some of their tools. Both get coaches in at the start and the end of the process, too. 

"In terms of evaluating bowlers when they come into the laboratory, we give them a comprehensive analysis of their alignment of their shoulders and their hips during delivery. It's a 3D analysis," Ferdinands says.

"We map the kinematics of the entire body and develop a performance profile including injury risk areas. Then sit down with the player and after evaluating their previous history of injury, work out whether any technical interventions are necessary."

Could have extended career
Ferdinands has also been involved in investigations over suspect bowling. Ironically, or cruelly, his is one of the few areas where Tait almost came into the analytics frame, in 2007 after Daniel Vettori and John Bracewell implied he was a chucker Tait called the comments "a disgrace" and there was no investigation, but this negative focus perhaps explains the fast bowler's antipathy towards being poked and probed with wearables and cameras.

"There is technology out there. To be brutally honest I've never found it that useful," Tait says. 

But he adds, glancing at an SAP stats screen, "I wish this had happened 13 years ago. This is the best technology I've seen for fast bowlers.

"At times we're pushing cricketers too far and just training for the sake of training between games," says Tait, who took a sabbatical in 2008, citing injuries and exhaustion.

"Technology like this is proof that sometimes you need to rest for a couple of days. You can manage players through a series or a season."

Tait retired from international cricket relatively young, in 2011. "I've had a long history of injuries and pretty consistent injuries," he says. He believes today's monitoring and preventative analysis could have extended his ODI and test career.

Not everybody benefits from exercise
And it's not just pro cricketers who could benefit from more personalised training.

Edinburgh University recently did a study of 1000 people to test their sensitivity to exercise, SAP chief technology officer for global customer organisations Irfan Khan says.

"The UK government guidelines are that every single citizen should exercise for a minimum of four hours a week to help keep fit and increase wellbeing. The reality though is that you may get a very different outcome. This study concluded that 15% of the sample had absolutely zero effect. They didn't benefit at all from having four hours of exercise on a weekly basis. Our DNA will almost determine what sensitivity."

Turning to Tait, he adds, "Shaun, you turn up to training and you're told to do drills and you're told to but the fact of the matter is it's not personalised at all. It's a generic set of training that's given to all fast bowlers . Maybe Shaun could have more personalised training that could prolong his career and this is where the technology, the connectivity with sensors comes into play."

Implants? We're already there
World Cup 2015 stats were delivered in real-time by SAP's Hana platform. Khan sees growing use for cloud-based applications on Hana, especially with the rise of the internet of things and blanket internet coverage (by 2030, SAP sees 90% of the world's land mass covered by wireless internet, and four hotspots for every person on the planet).

Be sees wearable sensors and real-time monitoring helping to combat everything from child obesity in the first world to malaria in the third. Sensors will tell a maintenance crew whether they have to visit a remote power pylon in the country side, or if it's about to fail. 

A wearable fitness and health monitoring band on your wrist is one thing. Many people wear them today.

Are we heading toward permanently implanted sensors?

"Right now, people have had pacemakers fitted for very many years," Khan notes. (And this is already an area of real-time monitoring. A person I know has a pacemaker that can transmit to a wi-fi receiver by her bed – which in turn relays information back to its manufacturer, Boston Scientific in the US, which then relays it back to Auckland Hospital.)

"If I was a diabetic, for example, and I knew the insulin administration I have to administer today could be offset by a sensor in my abdomen to constantly monitor my blood sugar levels, I would probably do that," he says.

"I suspect there will be a large minority, maybe even a majority of people who want to put themselves out there for having embedable sensors in their body so human endeavour could be enhanced and perhaps even advanced."

ckeall@nbr.co.nz

Follow @ChrisKeall

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