Bowling Speeds

[The Outsider]

Feel free to explain how being supremely athletic helped Kapil Dev in bowling fast. Let me know if you want more examples. The image of a typical fast bowler has always been the lazy lumbering jack types. Yes there are few exceptions. But there is no conclusive evidence to suggest that athleticism would contribute towards speed.

So what does contribute to speed - being fat and a slouch? BTW, Kapil, before his knee injury was quick - if I had to hazard a guess in the 85-90 mph range. He was clocking around 80 with some rudimentary and experimental speed guns in the late 80s in Sharjah.

[Guest BossBhai]

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[Guest BossBhai]

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[Sooda]

Boss Im curious as to when you think pace bowling became comparable then to that of modern times? Was there a phase like say the 70's when the WIndian quicks emerged when you think we can compare with modern times realistically. And if so, then why? I mean why around then. Lindwall was not fearsomely fast anyway. He lost much of his prime to WW2 and was well into his mid 20s when he made his debut, pace was never his weapon per se, more reliant on skill. But what of quicks of that era who were reportedly so- Gilchrist and Hall and Griffiths. Frank Tyson. How fast would they have been? Griffiths nearly killed Contractor so must have been a handful. Do runs scored against them too not necessarily count for much? Wes Hall began his career as Lindwalls was winding down and ended his career in 1969. Andy Roberts made his test debut in 74, Holding in 75. Are the latter two considered genuinely fast but Hall not? And if Hall was a genuine quick, then why not say, Tyson? At what point do we say- you know what, from now on they count...

[Lurker]

At what point do we say- you know what, from now on they count...

From the point where we can reach out to a random video and look at the computer clock to estimate the exact speed.

[Guest BossBhai]

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[rkt.india]

I am hoping for a 10-fer in this match for Ishant as he is the only bowler looking threatening from Indian bowlers.

[Sooda]

Wrong thread rkt?? :hmmm:

it depends on how gullible you are in believing written accounts of players that you never saw. I have made a conscious decision to never trust any of the past writers. You are free to buy all the yarn sold by Cardus and Co at face value. I only trust my eyes. As a glaring example just look at what Cardus has to say about Lindwall .. "He is one of the most hostile and artistic fast bowlers". Ohhh Really !! That clip in the OP tells me a totally different story.

Possibly, I do think it might be unfair to totally discount bowlers who you have not watched for that reason alone. If not Cardus’ word why not Sobers as Outsider points to. I think im right in saying Tyson was said to be the fastest bowler Bradman faced, and he operated around 20 years prior to Holding starting out. Unless something really dramatic happened between the 50's and the 70's in terms of fitness techniques and sports science (maybe, but I doubt) I’d guess he was not that much slower than Holding. Possibly a relevant analogy is Waqar bowled about 20 or so years before Steyn but would not be considered slower for that reason alone (i.e the passage of time) And if anything I’d think that there was more likey to have been sports sciences advances within these last 20 years that would have aided Steyns pace when compared to the 60's Just my 2 c's worth.

[The Outsider]

it never seemed to have gotten in the way of Gough and Shoaib. Yes if you are fit it will help you with remaining injury free and prolong your careers but by and large fast bowlers are naturals.

Gough was hardly express, for most of his career he was around the 85 mph mark. And Akhtar obviously with the chucking and/or hyperextension cannot be taken as a representative sample.

Nobody classifies Kapil as a out an out fast bowler even by mistake.

No, but he was at least as quick as Gough.

[The Outsider]

Going back to the Lindwall video ... I did a rudimentary calculation based on the start and stop times on that flash video. It does have milliseconds and you will have to try it many times to get that right as the counter moves in big chunks. The fastest time that I got was 0.52. We obviously know the distance approx 17.68 mtrs . so the speed in KMPH= ((17.68/1000) x 3600 ) / 0.52 = 122 KMPH = 76 MPH.

So, here is my attempt (please note the first shot is before the ball has been delivered and the second is after the shot has been played) - 0.49 seconds. It's likely to be less than that because of the places I took the shots - can easily be the 0.44 seconds you are looking for.

[The Outsider]

So' date=' here is my attempt (please note the first shot is [b']before the ball has been delivered and the second is after the shot has been played) - 0.49 seconds. It's likely to be less than that because of the places I took the shots - can easily be the 0.44 seconds you are looking for.

And just to illustrate the error we can get using this method check out this freeze frame which is pretty much identical to the first one in my previous post. The counter here is 00:40.40 and in the previous one it was 00:40.26. If we take this one instead we get a time of 0.35 seconds which would make Lindwall the fastest bowler ever (at least because the second freeze frame is after the shot has been played) by some distance at 180+ kmph.

[Holysmoke]

C'mon guys, are you being serious? Freeze frames? BTW, check out the ump in the freeze frames :hehe:

[The Outsider]

BTW, check out the ump in the freeze frames :hehe:

Exactly one of the points I made in the above two posts - the same freeze frame shows a differential of 0.14 seconds.

[ravishingravi]

Well what can I say about that. RoRo is my hero so I can not possibly go against him. He single handedly dismantled two of greatest bats of 80s, Richards and Sunny, with stats so.....

:hysterical::hysterical:

[Guest BossBhai]

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[The Outsider]

^ Yaar, you can ask anyone here or elsewhere you cannot add extra to the original video sampling which I've already shown in extremely poor. The best that can be done is to get hold of the original footage and play it in some professional video editor like Final Cut Pro which will give you a frame by frame decomposition.

[Guest BossBhai]

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[The Outsider]

I agree that the flash player that they (Britishpathe) are using is not accurate as you found out yourselves but I don't see any problem in the method that I used. Movie maker allows you to go frame by frame too. Anyhow a simple gut feeling estimate will tell you that he isnt anywhere near 90MPH. With due respects to the late Lindwall I cant possibly spend money on this .

LOL! I am not asking you to spend money. Let me try to explain - because of the poor frame rate of the original video you have no idea whether you are capturing the image at 00:00.00 or at 00:00.05. So just playing it in a supposedly more accurate Flash Player is not going to enhance the original sampling. To give you a still photography analogy - a frame shot at 3200 ISO can never be 'enhanced' to 100 ISO - yes digital software can do interpolation, to give a 100 ISO feel, but all that information is an artificial injection. BTW, I have Final Cut Pro (though I have never used it for a frame by frame decomposition), so if you can find a way to download the video I can try to play around on it. Though even that is going to be flaky compared to getting the actual footage and feeding it to Final Cut Pro, but much more reliable than the methods we've used so far which have given results fluctuating between 110-200 kmph.

[Guest BossBhai]

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[The Outsider]

^ The recording is useless - you can confirm with people experts in video editing. So, here we are based on video evidence Lindwall measures anywhere between 110-200 kmph.