Dr Paul Hawkins, inventor of Hawk-Eye
Glenn McGrath's seven wickets in England's first innings probably didn't come as a huge surprise to most people who have followed the Ashes series. His performance does provide a good opportunity to explain and highlight the importance of "The corridor of uncertainty".
The graphics above compares the "Normalised" past the stumps Hawk-Eye findings for McGrath (left) and Darren Gough (right) - (with a normalised view the results for left-handed batsmen are reversed). The box highlights the area where a ball bowled in the corridor of uncertainty will pass the stumps.
The first thing to note from this comparison is the higher percentage of balls which McGrath gets in this area compared to Gough, highlighting once again the Australian's great consistency.
The graphic also makes an interesting comparison between the English and Australian batsmen. The Australians were able to score seven boundaries from balls in the corridor bowled by Gough. By contrast England's scored one from McGrath. This shows how much less margin for error the English bowlers have to work with compared to the Australians.
This evidence would suggest that the English bowlers must aim to focus on getting a greater percentage of balls in the correct place to try and build pressure on the Australian batsmen.
The English batsmen may choose to exploit the one difficulty McGrath has. Due to his height McGrath has to overpitch the ball in order to get it to hit the stumps. He only bowled five balls which would have hit the stumps; three of these were hit for four and one of the others kept horribly low to dismiss Hussain LBW (despite it hitting him outside the line of off stump).
If the batsmen are able to leave the ball on length it may force McGrath into change and unsettle his rhythm. However, as the Headingley wicket becomes more variable the English batsmen may decide to put this plan on hold until they get to The Oval.
19 Aug, 2001
|
