The Cricketer vs the TrueMan by BOLA

The Cricketer team headed down to the MCC Cricket Academy at Lord’s to try out the four bowling machines on offer from BOLA

This is the new kid on the block, and thanks to its LED animations, cranks up the enjoyment even more.

The machine is controlled by a hand-held pad, a bit smaller than an iPad. Rather than the ‘feeder’ holding the ball up and dropping it into the machine, a rather nifty ‘elevator’ loads up 75 balls in one go. A laser guidance system lines up machine and stumps. A beep then indicates the bowler was commencing their run-up, before the 25-frames-per-second animation begins (rather resembling the opening credits to The Old Grey Whistle Test).

At the end of the run-up out comes the ball – and for those used to the original machine, it does take a little while to get used to. Apparently old pros like Marcus Trescothick like the original, and the young bucks like the new one. Any alleged resemblance to Mitchell Johnson (if you want to face left-arm quick) or Ryan Sidebottom in the mirror (flying locks bobbing up and down) is open to conjecture.

The ECB have bought 20, giving one each to the 18 counties, and two to the National Cricket Performance Centre at Loughborough. Chris Woakes and Moeen Ali have been using one to prepare to face the Australians.

The machine is compressible, so it fits through normal industrial doors.

I faced 78mph, much quicker than I have faced before I would say (perhaps Ian Graham, the former Suffolk Minor Counties bowler pinged a few down at me at that pace two decades over). At that speed one is playing on instinct (my eyesight was not good enough to pick it up very well). I was told I did well to lay bat on ball against a pair of swinging jaffas, although the thick nicks would probably have been snaffled by David Warner and Steve Smith in the slip cordon. Great fun…