A group of cricket-mad engineering students at The University of Western Australia has determined how pace and spin bowlers can maximise the amount of lateral movement (“swing” or “drift”) they get in the air.

Associate Professor Marco Ghisalberti, from UWA’s School of Engineering, said the fourth-year students now had a much greater understanding of the seam angle, ball roughness and spin rate that allowed bowlers to get the most movement out of the ball.

This would enable them to provide practical guidelines for bowlers at any level to add to their toolkit of techniques to improve their strike rate.

The students had come up with the idea of tracking the trajectory of a cricket ball by building a temporary net and setting up cameras to monitor its flight, Professor Ghisalberti said.

“There hasn’t been a huge amount of research done with realistic delivery of cricket balls in the past and a lot of the previous research has been in wind tunnels, which don’t provide an accurate measure of the amount of movement that a bowler can expect.”

The students erected a net at UWA’s Shenton Park Field Station to produce a controlled environment away from variable weather conditions such as wind.

Civil engineering student Ollie Moran said they had tried to control external variables that might affect the swing of the ball so they could narrow it down to the factors under the bowler’s control.

“We looked at variables such as seam angle, ball roughness and delivery speed to try and work out the influence of these factors on swing,” Ollie said.

Mechanical engineering student Brady Vidler said they tracked the ball using two cameras, with one camera on top of the net and above the bowler as they released the ball, with a second camera placed behind the bowler.

“This two-camera setup gives us all the information about the ball as it travels along its trajectory before hitting the wicket,” Brady said.

Associate Professor Ghisalberti said the students had also developed a code that allowed the ball to be tracked in three dimensions, which had many practical applications.

“Firstly, we can do a lot of experimentation in this facility to understand the variation of ball movement with the ball condition and delivery as well as using this as a training facility for cricket clubs and coaching clinics,” he said.

Ollie said while some fast bowlers bowled the ball straight on, many bowled with an angled seam. 

“What I was looking at was the seam angle that should be used to maximise swing,” he said.

Brady said the traditional theory for spin bowlers was that you simply needed to spin the ball more to get the ball to drift further.

“But this isn’t what I found in our research – what’s needed is to control the seam angles, which is potentially more difficult than just spinning it more but gives you more range of what you can do with the ball.”