Development of a smart cricket ball and advanced performance analysis of spin bowling

A smart cricket ball was developed which houses three high-speed gyros, PCB, microcontroller, battery, memory, and electronic equipment for wireless data transfer and inductive charging. The data sampling rate of the ball is 815 Hz. Six spin bowling deliveries were analysed with the smart ball: top-spin, side-spin, and back-spin, for both finger spin and wrist spin. The main difference between finger- and wrist spin deliveries was in the spin axis at release: negative in finger-spin and positive in wrist-spin. In the finger spin, the precession was characterised by a single peak, in contrast to wrist spin, which had a double peak. Backspin deliveries produced the highest precession velocity, with side spin and topspin progressively showing less precession. The data showed that the smart cricket ball is a potentially useful training tool, capable of quantifying not only the standard performance parameters of spin rate, torque and precession, but also the difference between spin bowling deliveries.