Monthly Archives: May 2011

England vs Sri Lanka 1st test Cardiff 2011

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It frustrates me at times when I hear the news that I’ve been anticipating for some time
Anderson injury causes England concern

Why is it frustrating? Because the ECB coaching system doesn’t seem to want to embrace technologies such as biomechanics to prevent this sort of thing.
Ever since I saw James Anderson bowl first in 2002 when making his ODI debut in Australia I have just thought stress fracture.
What happened in May 2006? Anderson hit by stress fracture

And his rehab began after a year out of the game. It was treated by remodelling his action. The bowling coach at the time was the rather inept Kevin Shine who tried to turn his mixed action into a side on action. While this would’ve maximised the swing he could generate I believe that his natural action is a chest on approach and it is only his delivery stride in the landing of his back foot that is causing him problems.

It took me quite some time to track a photo that demonstrates this but here’s one from 2009 after he had ignored the rehab following the recovery:

jimmy anderson

The key thing to note with this is that if you are bowling side on the front arm (left in this case) should be inside the line of the head. Jimmy clearly has his outside. The next thing to look at is the head position – this is falling to his left hand side. This is because his back foot is landing parallel to the return crease. He then pulls his left arm outside the left hand side of his head which causes his head to fall away to the left. This has the effect of pulling his left side down, twisting the back which will over time cause a stress fracture as the force after bowling as many overs as an international cricketer does wears away at the back.

Kevin Shine, the england bowling coach at the time, attempted to get his left arm inside the line of the head to straighten it up – the problem with that is that you have to turn yourself into a side on bowler. The solution in my mind and one that many bowlers who use technology come to is change the position of the back leg to be perpendicular to the return crease.

A good example would be Shaun Pollock who did exactly this to avoid injury:
shaun pollock

Compare this to Anderson’s landing:
Anderson

Having said all this the ECB really needs to consider papers like this one from the australian universities when advising bowlers early in their careers. It is far easier to change a bowling action when you’re 18-21 than when you’re over 30 as became increasingly obvious with Andrew Flintoff – his problems were different, attempts were made but in the end his career was brought to an early end because of a flawed bowling action

The Domesday Project

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It’s been nearly 2 years since I last did any blogging – this has been largely due to a lack of time.
However, I’ve missed it and decided to get back into it.
So, I’ll begin with The Domesday Project:

This was begun between 1984 and 1986 to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the Domesday Book which for those not familiar was a book commissioned in 1086 by the then King of England, William I (More commonly known as William the Conqueror) in order to determine what land and property existed in the United Kingdom and who owned it. This was for the purposes of tax collection, but also served a useful piece of information from a social history perspective. While it is not fully clear how long the collection process took it is suggested that it took the best part of a year to collate this information into the book.
To celebrate the 900th anniversary the BBC asked schools across the country to create their own version and a snapshot in time named The Domesday Project. Being done by children and teachers they gave themselves 2 years to record the information. Created in association with Acorn Computers, all the data was entered electronically onto a purpose built computer system. Cutting edge for its time it was able to collect text, photos and videos but also would become the google street view of its time.
It’s biggest flaw was it was too cutting edge and the times weren’t ready for the technology.
The data was catalogued on a new storage medium – Laser Disc. Using a scsi controller, the player could be attached to a BBC Master Computer and when combined with a tracker ball (precursor to the modern trackball or trackpad). All in it cost the best part of £5000 which at the time was the price of a small family car. Therefore, sales were low and the project went into obscurity.

This week, The project hit the news as word came through that a part of the BBC had, 25 years on, managed to convert the data into a format that would be accessible to all for free on the web. The concern had come that not enough of the laser disc players existed and that the discs themselves had become corrupted because of a flaw in their design.
Several previous attempts had been made – firstly using emulation of the original BBC Master software on windows PC’s, then a version which did not require the emulation as the software had been re-written for windows PC’s. But finally, the ultimate which does not require any software be installed on the end user’s computer other than a web browser. The domesday1986 blog documents this while the Beebmaster Website shows the technology used to create/play the original discs.

The link for the successfully restored data can be found here:
Domesday reloaded