Moments that changed cricket forever: Advent of technology in the gentleman's game

The acceptance of technology in cricket had further implications. Around the mid-90s, an English computer scientist Allan Plaskett started working on a technology which could graphically analyse sound and video.

This technology would enable the listener of the sound to “see” the sound as a shape on a waveform. The objective was to determine edges or snicks in cricket – a woody sound would be sharper than that of a ball hitting the pad or the bat hitting the pads, which would have a fatter waveform. The ‘Snickometer’ was formally introduced by Channel 4 in the UK in 1999 and Channel Nine in Australia soon after that.

Plaskett’s contemporary, Dr. Paul Hawkins meanwhile was developing something of his own at Roke Manor Research Limited, a subsidiary of Siemens.

He set up a number of high-speed cameras in conjunction with a ball tracker at different locations and angles around a “playing area”. The cameras and the ball tracker sent inputs to a system which rapidly processed the video feed and built up a record of the path along which the ball has travelled.

Using the principles of triangulation, the system would “predict” the future path of the ball had it not interacted with any of the playing area features.

The Hawkeye system was built for a variety of sports, but it found its primary use in cricket (and also tennis, to verify line calls) for checking the trajectory of balls in flight and later for checking LBW decisions.

In 2001, Channel 4 utilised the services of this technology for the first time in a Test match between Pakistan and England at Lord’s. The following year, the Hawkeye came in for a bout of serious criticism during the India-England Test series. Harbhajan Singh bowled Andy Caddick with a ball that just clipped the bails, whereas Hawkeye showed the ball’s trajectory would miss the stumps by a little margin.