At 96mph the ball travels from the bowler to the batsman in the bat of an eyelid. Really. At that speed a batsman has around 0.4sec to play with which, most studies seem to agree, also happens to be how long it takes to blink. But that 0.4sec is only a fag-packet calculation. The true number would allow for the ball’s deceleration and its journey down into the pitch and up away from it, but still, we are dealing with the tiny margins, tenths and hundredths, that a batsman has to spot the length, the line, make up his mind, and then play a shot. So near the top of the accelerometer, cricket begins to seem almost physically impossible.
At that speed strange things start to happen, for the batsman, the bowler, and the spectators. Time begins to both speed up and slow down, as though someone’s sitting on the remote. Our sense of it gets elastic. On Saturday Steve Smith, who, with his Heath Robinson batting technique, usually seems to have so much time to work in, was all of a sudden so short of it he could not even make it halfway through a shot before the ball was on him. And then when he fell, everything slowed right down again, as the crowd fell silent and minds filled with a flood of awful thoughts.
The difference between the half-second before the ball hit him and the half-second afterwards could be measured in minutes.
In the rush, everything became a little blurry and uncertain and frantic. Right after, everyone was wondering when, if ever, an Englishman had ever bowled quicker, and speculating about who, if anyone, had ever made a better debut. Again, then, our minds were playing games. It was only six months ago that Mark Wood was bowling 95mph against West Indies in St Lucia, when he took five for 41. And there was another fast bowler in this very same Test, Pat Cummins, who swept away South Africa with six for 79 in Johannesburg when he was an 18-year-old tearaway playing his first match in 2011.
So it’s not just the batsmen who stop thinking clearly. The spectators do too. We get so worked up about what’s in front of us we cannot believe it was ever any better. There is a school of thought that bowlers are bound to be faster now, simply because of the advances in sport science, strength and conditioning. Records progress, the argument goes. Except no one has come within 20cm of Mike Powell’s long jump world record in almost 30 years and Seb Coe still holds the British 800m record set in 1981, and the time Jim Hines ran in the 1968 Olympic 100m final would have won him bronze at the world championships in 2017 in a dead heat with Usain Bolt.
In baseball, the fastest recorded pitch was thrown by Aroldis Chapman, 105.1mph, in 2010 but retrospective analysis has shown Nolan Ryan was pitching nearly as quick in 1974 and Bob Feller was not so far behind in 1946. Pitchers have been throwing at 100mph for almost 100 years. There are no great leap forwards left to make.
In cricket, the fastest ball is still Shoaib Akhtar’s to Nick Knight during Pakistan’s match against England in the 2003 World Cup. But Knight played it like he faced it hundreds of times before and even Shoaib admitted there is some scepticism about the measurement. You cannot really trust the speed guns, when during this same Lord’s Test one of Archer’s loopy knuckleballs got clocked at 90mph.
Scientists have tried to get more precise measurements. A study done in 1976 clocked Jeff Thompson’s top speed at 99.8mph, and Michael Holding’s at 95.2mph, but then another, just three years later had Thompson at 91.8mph and Holding at 87.76mph. Back before that Frank Tyson, likely the fastest England ever had, remembered being tested at New Zealand’s Aeronautical College in Wellington in 1955. “We bowled in two or three sweaters,” Tyson said, “and I cannot vouch for the length of our run-ups.” Tyson says he was clocked at 89mph, from a strolling start.
Tyson knew as much about fast bowling as anyone. “He fell into the particularly modern pattern of the sportsman who, by taking thought, has added a cubit to his athletic stature,” wrote John Arlott. “He applied an academically trained brain to sport and, beginning from the basic principles of bowling, analysed his physical assets and exploited them to maximum effect.”
As a player, writer, scholar, and coach, Tyson made a lifelong study of both the art and science of fast bowling. He became an early evangelist for biomechanics. But in the end, right towards the end of his life, he still believed “the only true judge of a bowler’s speed is the batsman himself”.
The truth is that, just as in baseball, there has always been a small number of men who are able to bowl right up above 95mph. It’s not a peak but a plateau and up there everything gets subjective and dependent on a wild number of variables. Not just the predictable ones, like the batsman’s ability, and their familiarity with the bowler’s action, the pitch and the atmospheric conditions, but more ephemeral things too. Perhaps the batsman has happened to catch the bowler in a bad mood; maybe, like Smith did, he just made the mistake of thrashing him through cover for four. They are all fast, who is fastest depends on who you were unlucky enough to face and where and when it happened.
