In a pressured situation, which bowler does a captain turn to? Who will be able to execute their skills? With the Wickets app, captain and coach will know exactly who is the right bowler for the job
Bowling at the death is not easy. If a side heads into the final 10 overs needing 15 runs per over to win you would fancy the bowling team to win. However if a team needs 15 to win off the last over the odds change (isn't that right, Ben Stokes?!).
When bowling the final over one misplaced delivery can lose the game, that is some pressure to deal with. And with the 360 degree nature of batters in the modern game, the areas that bowlers are trying to hit are microscopic. Imagine trying to hit a coin with the match on the line.
But bowlers keep pulling the rabbit out of the hat, and this is no accident.
The secret is practice. However in this there is a problem. It can be difficult to chart your improvement when bowling in training. How does a coach or captain know if their bowler is consistent enough to execute their skills in a pressurised match situation.
Rob Cassell – founder of the Wickets app and Cricket Ireland assistant coach and fast bowling lead – had this problem. Cassell was the bowling coach for South Australia when Jamie Cox – South Australia's high-performance manager at the time – asked him "how are you getting your bowlers better and how are you quantifying it?"
Cassell took this question seriously and wanted to go deeper than just looking at match performance, particularly as many players don't play matches for the first team.
"We got the clipboard and paper out and started drawing beehives by hand." This is where Wickets began.
Cassell and his team would ask a bowler where they intended to bowl and then would chart where the ball actually went.
"We put all of this data into an excel spreadsheet and at the end of the month I would put up a leaderboard of who had bowled the best for various types of deliveries such as yorkers and top of off."
Cassell started to see results from his system and created an app to do the work for him. Then to be made available to coaches, analysts and players around the world.
"I developed the app to make my training sessions better and to give more motivation to my bowlers. Hopefully it can update and modernise the way bowlers train.
"Coaches need to have more information about their bowlers and make every ball count at practice. Rather than just bowling 30-40 balls with no accountability the Wickets app charts progress and stops mindless bowling.
"Of course, there is a time and a place when bowlers shouldn’t be measured, like when bowlers are experimenting for example, but if it is a contest between bat and ball or we are having a yorker competition we will definitely use it."
The app in action and Cassell in his playing days
Cassell considers Australian seamer Kane Richardson to be the best yorker bowler (55% success rate) he has ever worked with fellow Aussie Chadd Sayers (72%) up there as well.
And ahead of the inaugural England v Ireland Test at Lord's Cassell has been planning his Irish bowling attack.
"Tim Murtagh is very consistent at hitting top of off and Craig Young has an excellent yorker in the Irish set up. They have both got a lot of experience and Young has played really well this summer after coming back from injury.
"We are trying to build a group of fast bowlers who can execute consistently and it all starts at practice."
Ireland's visit to Lord's will be a huge occasion for a country who have finally muscled their way onto cricket's top table. And the coaches and captain will want to make sure they pick a bowling attack that can perform under pressure and prove that they belong in the Test arena.
With the Wickets app they can be confident of doing just that.
Find out more about Wickets at www.wicketsapp.com