Dr Paul Hawkins, inventor of Hawk-Eye
Mike Brearley's comments at the end of the Lord's Test prompted me to do some investigation into all of the LBW decisions so far in this series.
Brearley noted that the Lord's wicket had caused problems for the batsmen not so much by the odd ball lifting, but by the occasional ball which had kept low.
In particular he may have hand in mind the ball with which Glenn McGrath dismissed Alec Stewart in England's second innings. The ball pitched 7.56 metres from the stumps and would have passed the stumps at a height of 70.5 cm. The previous ball pitched 6.95 meters from the stumps and passed at a height of 1.01 meters, both balls jagging back sharply off the seam.
Further investigation showed that Stewart is not alone. Mike Atherton's LBW in the first innings pitched 8 metres from the stumps, exactly the same length as the previous ball. His penultimate ball passed the stumps at 1.31 meters and the ball which got him out passed the stumps at 81cm (still too high to be hitting the stumps, so Atherton can consider himself unlucky on two counts).
The trend continues. Out of the 12 LBW dismissals in the first two Tests, eight were to balls which bounced much less than other deliveries pitching in the same area from the same bowler.
Only two of the remaining four dismissals, Brett Lee dismissing Graham Thorpe at Lord's and Jason Gillespie dismissing Usman Afzaal at Edgbaston, could be considered to be balls which had a true bounce. However Hawk-Eye shows that neither of these balls would have hit the stumps.
The final two LBW decisions were from the bowling of Shane Warne. He is the only bowler who has managed to get an LBW decision without requiring assistance from either the wicket, the umpire or both.
The trend isn't quite so clear cut, but in general wickets which were caught got more bounce than would have been expected.
Look out for the new "bounce" analysis mode coming to the Hawk-Eye interactive tool in the next few days.
Click the Launch Hawk-Eye button at the top of this page to do your own interactive anlysis of the 12 LBW decisions in the first two Tests.
23 Jul, 2001
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