Technology in Cricket
While the game of cricket is on, umpire takes several decisions. But sometimes, the umpire faces difficulties while giving decisions. He might not be able to see every corner of the field, sometimes the incidents like run-outs etc. are too fast to be judged by the naked eyes . Wrong decisions / debatable decisions almost always cause bad blood between two teams. To alleviate such disputes, the umpire takes the help of technology directly or indirectly through the third umpire who sits in front of the Display and off the fields. Depending on the query by the field umpires, he either provides verdicts or provide requisite feedback to field umpires enabling them to take right decisions. There many applications of technology in cricket but some of the important new technology applications are the following:
Graphics package:
It is basically used for the benefit of TV viewers. A lot of technology are used together to put up a correct score board of a match. The score board which normally looks like a replica of the physical score board, is actually hyper linked with many view windows and statistics.
This simple scoreboard also provides stunning visual statistics like the following:
Hawk eye:
This is a computer system which is used to show the path of a cricket ball when the bowler bowls the ball towards the batsman on the pitch. There is often confusion about the probable trajectory of the ball after it hits the pad. Human eye often fails to judge the scenario correctly. This system considers many external factors like speed, bounce, impact, distance of the impact etc. and simulates the probable trajectory of the bowl to predict if the bowl would have hit the wicket. It also shows if the pitch of the ball is outside the leg stamp. This system is basically used to adjudicate the LBW decisions.
Snick-o-Meter:
Snick-o-Meter was invented by Allen Plaskett. It is also commonly known as a Snicko. It measures the sound frequencies while the ball passes the bat and uses the pattern matching of the library sound frequencies of the ball hitting various surfaces. The basic idea is to see if the captured sound matches with the library sound of ball hitting the bat. It is actually a very sensitive microphone, which is placed in one of the stumps so that it can catch the sound of the ball hitting the bat. Currently, this technology is only used to give the viewers of the television an idea about the caught behind scenario. It has not been deployed as a fully approved method to judge the caught behind scenario.
Ball Spin RPM:
Ball Spin RPM shows revolution per minute of a ball. It shows the speed of spin of a ball after release.. Again, this technology is still used for informative purpose to make it more tangible to the TV viewers. It is also used for post match analysis and debugging of mystery spin ball and the bowling pattern.
