Cricket Batting Tips

3/8/2018 What does a batsman see?
| The Cricket Monthly | ESPN Cricinfo
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FEATURE
What does a batsman see?

More importantly, how does he see? Unlocking one of the
great secrets of run-scoring
SB TANG | MARCH 7, 2018
I
t is late December 1971. A tall, 23-year-old
South Australian by the name of Greg
Chappell walks down the ornate wood-and-
107 iron staircase of Hadley's Orient Hotel in Hobart.
Like
He is meeting his older brother Ian for dinner. The
Tweet two have been parachuted in to bolster a Tasmania
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Tasmania Cricket Association Ground.
The younger of the two Chappells follows the

staircase as it takes a 90-degree left turn, walks past
the large portrait of a young Queen Victoria and
emerges into the beautiful red-and-gold carpeted
lobby of the hotel built by convicts more than a
century ago. Ian is running late, as usual. Greg, on
time as usual, waits patiently. The concierge
approaches him. "Mr Chappell," he says, "there's a
letter for you." Greg immediately recognises the
handwriting on the envelope - it belongs to his
father.
He doesn't know it, but the contents of this

envelope will change his life. There's no letter
inside, just a newspaper clipping - an opinion
article by the Adelaide Advertiser's chief cricket
writer, Keith Butler. It says that Chappell is wasting
his enormous talent and the way he's batting he
won't make the forthcoming Ashes tour. At the end
of the article he sees the one-line message his
father has written: "I don't believe everything that
Keith says, but it might be worth thinking about."
Suddenly, Greg doesn't feel hungry at all. "Mate," he

tells Ian when he arrives in the lobby, "I'm just
going to stay in." He walks back upstairs. He doesn't
turn on the lights. In a corner of his single room,
there is an upholstered chair. He sits down on it in
the dark, alone, and thinks. He thinks about every
single game of cricket that he has ever played, from
his very first in the backyard with his brother Ian,
to park and beach cricket with his mates, to
schoolboys' cricket for Prince Alfred College, to
grade cricket for Glenelg District Cricket Club, to
Sheffield Shield cricket for South Australia, to
county cricket for Somerset, to Test cricket for
Australia.
What he seeks is nothing less than the answer to

the question that has plagued every batsman since
the dawn of time: what is the cause of the massive
performance differential between my good days
and my bad days? What exactly is it that I'm doing

better on my good days than on my bad days?
Deep Dasgupta explains what he looks at when the bowler delivers the ball
As he searches his mind for the answer, he enters a

deep meditative state. Time passes quickly. Hours
later - it is difficult for him to tell how many - he
emerges with a stunning realisation: by playing
cricket since the age of four, he had, without
realising it, developed a systemic process of
concentration and a precise method of watching
the ball; but he had only been using them
consistently on his good days.
There lay the answer to his question: all he had to

do was use his own systemic process of
concentration and precise method of watching the
ball every single time he walked out to bat.
From that day forth, he stops mindlessly hitting

balls in training. Instead, he focuses on his process
of concentration and method of watching the ball.
The aim is to be able to use that mental routine
against every single ball that he faces in a match.
Five days after his epiphany in Hobart, he gets the
opportunity to apply his newfound theory in a
match. He is called up to play for Australia -
captained by Ian - in their third unofficial Test
against the Sobers-captained World XI at the MCG,
starting on New Year's Day 1972.
In Australia's first innings, he scores an unbeaten

115. Eight days later, he scores an unbeaten 197 at
the SCG in the fourth unofficial Test. As he walks
off to the applause of the 19,125-strong crowd, he
knows deep down that his batting has gone to an
entirely different level. At the tender age of 23, he
has discovered what most batsmen spend their
entire careers searching fruitlessly for: the secret -
for him, anyway - to scoring runs at Test level.
Before his epiphany in Hobart, Chappell scored 243

runs in five Tests at an average of 34.71. After his
epiphany, he scored 6867 runs - including 23
hundreds - in 82 Tests at an average of 54.93.
T
he mental routine that enabled Chappell,
in an era when Test bowling was arguably
the strongest that it has ever been, to
maintain a Test average in excess of 50 for nearly a
decade is not particularly complicated.
It starts with the logical principle that mental

energy is a finite resource that a batsman must
conserve if he is to achieve his ultimate objective of
scoring as many runs as possible, which will require
him to spend hours, if not days, out in the middle.
Bradman had less than 20/20 eyesight.

Barry Richards made the same discovery.
He tried corrective lenses, but the 20/20
vision freaked him out - he saw too much
Chappell realised that he had three ascending levels

of mental concentration: awareness, fine focus and
fierce focus. In order to conserve his finite
quantum of mental energy, he would have to use
fierce focus as little as possible, so that it was
always available when he really needed it. When he
walked out to bat, his concentration would be set at
its lowest, power-saving level: awareness. He would
mark his guard and look around the field,
methodically counting all ten fielders until his gaze
reached the face of the bowler standing at the top of

his mark.
At that point, he would increase his level of

concentration to fine focus. As the bowler ran in, he
would gently and rhythmically tap his bat on the
ground, keeping his central vision on the bowler's
face and his peripheral vision on the bowler's body.
He believed that a bowler's facial expression and
the bodily movements in his run-up and load-up
offered the batsman valuable predictive clues as to
what ball would be bowled. He would not look at the
ball in the bowler's hand as he ran in.
As the bowler jumped into his delivery stride, he

would switch up his concentration to its maximum
level - fierce focus - and shift his central vision the
short distance from the bowler's face to the window
just above and next to his head from where he
would release the ball. Once the ball appeared in
that window, Chappell would watch the ball itself
for the first time. He could see everything. He could
see the seam of the ball and the shiny and rough
side of the ball, even when he was facing a genuine
fast bowler. Against spinners, he could see the ball
spinning in the air as it travelled towards him. In
the unlikely event that he failed to pick what
delivery it was out of the hand, he could simply pick
it in the air.
"There weren't too many balls that I faced that I

was unsure about," Chappell tells the Cricket
Monthly matter-of-factly. Because he was able to so
quickly decipher where a ball was going to be, he
was able to confidently move into position early to,
if at all possible, play an attacking, run-scoring
shot. Like all of Australia's great Test batsmen,
Chappell believes that a batsman should always
have the positive mindset of looking to score runs.
The greatest threat to that mindset is, and has
always been, the thought that lurks omnipresently
in the back of every batsman's mind, simply
because he is a human being: the fear of getting out.
By giving the mind something to do at each and
every stage of an innings, a well-defined mental
routine such as Chappell's helps quash that fear.
As soon as he finished playing a delivery - whether

he had driven it for four, left it, or played and
missed it - Chappell cycled his concentration back
down to its minimum level of awareness. He
understood the importance of keeping his focus on
the present. That meant that he had to completely
let go of the last ball, even if it had missed his off
stump by a millimetre. So he gave his mind
something relaxing to do while it was powered
down in awareness mode - he looked into the crowd
and, whenever he was playing at home, he delighted
in finding family and friends and seeing what they
were up to. When they met up for dinner in the
evenings, his friends were flabbergasted that he was
able to recite their movements for the entire day.
After his revelation in Hobart, Greg Chappell made more than 6500 runs at 54.93 © Getty Images
"I have no doubt," Chappell says, "that what allowed

me to achieve what I achieved was the fact that I
was lucky enough to have learned early in my
career that it was about… my mind, not my body.
And my subconscious mind was a better cricketer
than I could ever be, so what I had to do was get the
conscious mind out of the way… give it a job to do -
watch his face, watch the [window of release] - and
allow my subconscious mind to react to what
came."
He saw that the mistake that most batsmen make,

especially when they are striving to fulfil their
lifelong dream of playing Test cricket for their

country, is that they try too hard. They stop trusting
the natural instincts that have got them that far and
start worrying about getting out, or fretting about
the correctness or otherwise of their technique.
At club level, the mistake of trying too hard

manifests itself in an even more fundamental error
- watching the ball too hard. Former Australia
batsman Greg Blewett vividly recalls playing
against some grade batsmen who never took their
eyes off the ball while they were on strike. They
would "watch the ball go from the keeper's hands to
first slip, from first slip to point, point to cover,
cover to mid-off [and mid-off to the bowler's
hands]". Then they would keep watching the ball in
the bowler's hands from the top of his run-up to the
point of release.
According to Chappell's theory, that method of

narrowly watching the ball creates at least four
substantive problems.
Firstly, the batsman burns through his finite

quantum of mental energy at a rapid rate.
Secondly, watching the ball in the bowler's hand as

he is running in has the potential to destabilise a
batsman's eyes. "Some bowlers run in and their
arms are going everywhere," explains Blewett, a
follower of Chappell's theory in the back end of his
playing career and now an advocate of it as the head
coach of South Australia Under-19s and an assistant
coach of South Australia and Adelaide Strikers. "It'd
be really hard to focus on that ball [because] your
eyes would be darting all over the place."
Thirdly, if the batsman watches the ball in the

bowler's hand as he's running in then once the
bowler jumps into his delivery stride, he will have
to quickly shift his central vision from the ball in
the bowler's hand next to his thigh up to the area
above his head from which he will release the ball.
That is a long distance to have to rapidly shift one's
central vision, certainly much longer than the short
distance - from the bowler's face to the window of
release - that adherents to Chappell's theory have
to shift their central vision. "It's ad hoc," says

Chappell. He "could get there 75% of the time, but
25% of the time might struggle to get there at the
right time, whereas… he could get [from the
bowler's face to the window of release] nearly 100%
of the time."
Greg Blewett firmly believes that the

subject of watching the ball and how to
best watch it is "one of the most
important things there is" for batsmen
Fourthly, if the batsman focuses his gaze solely and

exclusively on the ball in the bowler's hand as he is
running in, then he undermines his peripheral
vision of the bowler's face and body, thereby
robbing himself of the visual clues that may help
him predict what ball the bowler is going to bowl.
Thus, "watch the ball", that generic bit of advice

that every cricketer has heard at some point in
their life, could, says Chappell, "be the wrong
instruction" - if it is unaccompanied by any
explanation or discussion as to how to watch the
ball.
Indeed, one could argue that the batting maxim

reportedly promulgated by the current Australian
head coach Darren Lehmann - "watch the ball, c**t"
- is problematic for more reasons than one. It could
easily be misinterpreted to mean "watch the ball
really hard", which would lead batsmen to watch
the ball in an overly narrow fashion.
W
hen Chappell first became aware of
his method of watching the ball some
46 years ago, the technology did not
exist to scientifically test and evaluate it. That
technology - in the form of glasses that allow
scientists to record and see where a batsman is
looking - now exists, and in the past seven years two
strands of research have emerged to support

Chappell's method.
The first strand consists of two empirical studies.

The first of those studies, conducted by sports
scientists David Mann, Wayne Spratford and Bruce
Abernethy in 2012, tested the batting performance
of two Australian Test batsmen - each of whom had
played more than 70 Tests and averaged in excess of
45 - and two Australian grade batsmen. This was
done with the players wearing Mobile Eye eye-
tracking glasses. The second study, conducted by
sports scientists Abernethy, Mann and Vishnu
Sarpeshkar in 2017, tested the batting performance
of 43 batsmen while they wore the same glasses - 13
elite adults who had represented their state or
country at senior level (including four members of
the Australian squad), ten elite juniors who had
represented their state or country at U-19 or U-17
level (including four members of the Australian U-
19 squad), ten adult club batsmen (with an average
age of 31.7) and ten young club batsmen (with an
average age of 21).
A key finding from these two empirical studies is

that the elite batsmen - that is, the two Australian
Test batsmen from the 2012 study and the 13 elite
adults and ten elite juniors from the 2017 study -
were distinguished from club batsmen by their
superior ability to predictively saccade their vision:
that is, they could accurately jump their vision
ahead of the ball's live flight path to where the ball
is going to be.
When they were facing anything shorter than a full

delivery, the elite batsmen were generally able to
accurately saccade their vision twice - once to the
point of bounce, and once following the point of
bounce to the point of bat-ball impact.
Watching the ball actually involves a certain amount of

prediction about where the ball is going to be once released ©
Getty Images
They were also able to maintain their gaze at the

point of bat-ball contact when hitting the ball.
Hence, elite batsmen are more likely than club
batsmen to be able to see their bat hitting the ball.
Justin Langer, for example, told Mann, "I know that
I watch the ball at the moment I hit it," and could
clearly describe seeing markings on the ball as it
made contact with his bat during his playing days.
Don Bradman believed that this is possible too,
instructing batsmen in his classic coaching book,
The Art of Cricket: "Try to glue the eyes on the ball
until the very moment it hits the bat. This cannot
always be achieved in practice but try."
The superior ability to accurately perform the two

saccades against balls of all lengths, Mann tells the
Cricket Monthly, "seems to be non-negotiable" for
elite batsmen. As a scientist, he is quick to
acknowledge that "it's always hard to tease apart
what makes [a batsman] great, or what's an effect of
him being great", but underlines that "all the elite
guys that we've tested" do the two saccades.
As a matter of logic, in order for the elite batsmen's

saccadic eye movements to work successfully, they
have to be able to accurately predict where the ball
is going to be (so that they can saccade their vision

to that spot before the ball gets there).
Think about that for a moment. Such an ability

more closely resembles the powers of a (fictional)
Jedi Knight than those we typically associate with
real-world flesh-and-blood athletes. "He can see
things before they happen," said the Jedi Master
Qui-Gon Jinn of a nine-year-old boy named Anakin
Skywalker. "That's why he appears to have such
quick reflexes. It's a Jedi trait." Well, science now
tells us that elite batsmen aren't much different:
they know where the ball is going to be before it
gets there and saccade their vision to that point.
That's how they appear to have such quick reflexes.
That predictive ability is - as Chappell theorised 46

years ago in a Hobart hotel room - partially derived
from the visual information batsmen obtain from a
bowler's run-up and load-up. That information,
explains Mann, is one of "three key sources of
predictive information" for a batsman. The other
two are the "online" information that a batsman
can obtain from the live ball flight and the
"contextual information" that a batsman can obtain
about a bowler from having faced him before in a
match, watching TV footage of him, or studying
statistics about his prior behaviour.
The second strand of research lending support to

Chappell's theory is a study conducted at the
Australian Institute of Sport in 2010 by Mann,
Abernethy and Damian Farrow. The scientists gave
ten Australian grade batsmen with natural 20/20
vision contact lenses blurring their vision at three
increasing levels: +1.00, +2.00 and +3.00. The
batsmen - some of whom had represented their
state or territory at senior or junior level - wore
liquid crystal occlusion goggles that on random
deliveries occluded (that is, completely blocked)
their vision at the approximate moment when the
bowler released the ball.
What Chappell seeks is nothing less than

the answer to the question that has
plagued every batsman: what is the cause
of the massive differential between my
good days and bad?
The scientists then tested the batsmen's

performance against three bowlers - two medium-
pacers who were opening the bowling in second
grade in Canberra and a quick who had played in
the Big Bash League as an opening bowler. The
batsmen were asked to perform one of two tasks:
try to strike the ball with their bat, or merely call
out whether the ball was an off-side or leg-side
delivery. The scientists then recorded whether the
batsmen swung their bat on the correct side of the
wicket, and whether they correctly called out off
side or leg side.
The results they obtained were interesting. With

their vision occluded when the bowler released the
ball, the batsmen were able to swing their bat on
the correct side of the wicket nearly 80% of the
time when they were wearing +1.00 blurring lenses.
This suggests that a batsman's ability to access the
predictive clues in the bowler's run-up and load-up
is arguably as, or even more, important to his ball-
striking performance as his ability to actually see
the ball at the moment it leaves the bowler's hand.
(In case you were wondering, the +2.00 and +3.00
blurring lenses clearly reduced the batsmen's
anticipatory performance.)
The batsmen's accuracy in calling out whether the

ball was an off-side or leg-side delivery when they
had 20/20 vision was terrible - barely above 50%.
Their verbal calling performance clearly improved
when they wore the +1.00 blurring lenses. This
suggests that the batsmen's usage of the visual
clues in the bowler's run-up and load-up is
subconscious. "So when they were in the situation
where they had to consciously think about
[whether the ball would be a leg-side or off-side
delivery] and… call out [which it would be], the
+1.00 somehow made them better," says Mann. "It

seems as though taking away that very clear,
conscious information [that they get with 20/20
vision] may give them access to the [subconscious]
information that they're more likely to rely on in a
coupled scenario [that is, when they're asked to try
hit the ball with their bat]."
N
ow, a sceptic might ask, scientific
research in a laboratory is all well and
good, but how does Chappell's theory
fare today in the real world of first-class and Test
cricket?
The Cricket Monthly spoke to six active professional

Australian batsmen - all of whom have played
Shield cricket and three of whom have played Test
cricket - and one retired Australian Test batsman.
Six of the seven batsmen - 27-year-old Chris Lynn,
35-year-old Ed Cowan, 24-year-old Kurtis
Patterson, 20-year-old Will Pucovski, 46-year-old
Greg Blewett, and 28-year-old Joe Burns - said that
they naturally and independently developed a
method for watching the ball that is either identical
or very similar to Chappell's. The only one who
didn't - 43-year-old Brad Hodge - had specific
medical and environmental reasons for his
divergence, as we will see.
Research suggests that even when their vision is completely blocked at the moment the bowler
releases the ball, batsmen can often correctly guess on which side the ball is going to land, based
on clues they pick up from the bowler's run-up © Getty Images
Lynn, Cowan, Patterson, Pucovski and Blewett's

methods are identical to Chappell's in that they do
not watch the ball in the bowler's hand as he runs in
to bowl and only start watching it when it appears
in the window above and next to the bowler's head
from where it will be released. Burns differs slightly
in that he tries to visually "lock in" on the seam of
the ball in the bowler's hand as soon as it comes up
over the bowling shoulder just prior to release.
Thus, he starts watching the ball a fraction earlier
than the others and the window he looks at is larger
than that used by the others, extending from the
bowler's bowling shoulder all the way up to the
estimated point of release.
This slight difference may stem from the fact that,

unlike Lynn, Cowan, Patterson, Pucovski and
Blewett, none of whom can recall ever using a
method for watching the ball different from that
which they use now, Burns clearly recalls using an
entirely different method when he was a kid.
"I used to really focus on [the ball] in the bowler's

hand [as he ran in]", says Burns, who has scored
three Test hundreds in 13 Tests. One evening, when
he was about 16, Burns felt "really rushed and
hurried up by the ball" as he was batting under
lights on a synthetic pitch while training at
Northern Suburbs District Cricket Club in
Brisbane's Shaw Park. The bowlers were getting
faster, both in terms of ball- and arm speed, as he
advanced through the ranks, and he realised there
and then that watching the ball in the bowler's hand
from the top of his mark just wasn't working. His
reasoning was similar to that reached by Chappell
and Blewett years earlier: his eyes were getting
destabilised by the movement in the bowlers' hands
as they ran in; he had insufficient time to react well
to the ball being bowled; and there was a real risk
that he could lose track of the ball, especially if the
bowler had a whippy, slingy or heavily side-on
action.
Thus, that evening in Shaw Park, Burns "naturally"

switched to his present method. Like Chappell,
Burns looks at the bowler - not the ball - as he runs
in, keeping his eyes "relaxed", but whereas Chappell
looked specifically at the bowler's face as he ran in,

Burns looks at the bowler generally.
Blewett's point of focus is similar, although not

identical to Burns'. He looks generally at the
bowler's whole body as he's running in before
focusing more on his top half as he gets closer to the
crease. Lynn - an active coach who works with club
mates and youngsters - and Patterson are identical
to Chappell: they look at the bowler's face as he's
running in. Cowan and Pucovski, a 20-year-old
Victorian who has just scored his maiden first-class
century in his second Shield game, do not
consciously watch anything specific at all as the
bowler's running in - Cowan refers to this almost
meditative state of mind as "completely egoless and
emotionless… indifference"; Pucovski calls it
"trying to keep as clear a mind as possible" - but
readily acknowledge that their subconscious is able
to easily identify and process the visual predictive
clues in the bowler's run-up and load-up.
Cowan does not consciously watch

anything specific as the bowler is running
in - he refers to this almost meditative
state of mind as "completely egoless and
emotionless… indifference"
"So much is picked up in those cues," observes

Cowan, "and you can't underestimate" them, which
is why, if he hasn't faced a bowler before, he will go
watch them bowl from behind as they are warming
up out in the middle and mentally "practise batting
against them". That information is then safely
stored in his mind, ready for his subconscious to
access as the bowler runs in to bowl to him in the
match. If a bowler runs in faster or grimaces, then
that is picked up automatically by his subconscious
mind without his conscious mind even realising it.
Similarly, despite not consciously watching

anything specific at all as the bowler is running in,
Pucovski has no trouble seeing predictive clues in

the bowler's run-up and load-up, such as fast
bowlers who "drag their front shoulder off" when
they're about to bowl a bouncer, and bowlers who
"open up their action quite a bit more" for their
inswinger or are "more side-on" for their
outswinger.
Even someone like Burns, who at a conscious level

watches the bowler generally, says: "I don't think I
consciously notice [those visual clues]. It's not like
a bowler runs in and I think, 'Yeah, he's bowling an
inswinger' or 'He's bowling an outswinger' or 'He's
bowling a bumper'. But there are times where… it
almost feels like instinct that you know where a ball
is going to be. I think that's just from the cues that
you pick up subconsciously from all the
information that the bowler's giving you as he runs
in." Lynn even looks at "where [the bowler's] eyes
are looking" as he's running in.
The importance of conserving scarce mental energy

was another of Chappell's principles that met with
universal approval from the seven batsmen
interviewed. Each had his own mechanism for
completely switching off between balls and overs.
Lynn relaxes his mind by standing still in his crease
and having a look around the field, picking up any
available cues from the fielders - especially the
captain - and the bowler. Between overs, unless the
match situation - for example, a pitch that's playing
up or a run chase - requires it, Lynn generally
doesn't think or talk about cricket at all. "Especially
if I'm batting with someone like [Brendon]
McCullum," says Lynn, "we just talk about
whatever." He admits, with a good-natured laugh,
that sometimes he and his batting partner will look
into the crowd to "try and find" some attractive
members of the other sex.
To switch off, Burns strolls down the pitch, does

some gardening, chats to his partner then walks
back to his crease. "If I stand stationary at the
crease," he explains, "I start to have different
thoughts in my mind, which just taxes energy from
what I'm trying to do. So I try and keep myself
active and not be still for too long."
A similar method is employed by Patterson, a tall,

lean New South Welshman who, with 2250 first-
class runs at 45.91 over the last two years, is
knocking on the door to Test selection. "I just walk
away to square leg and think about whatever it is
that I want to think about and don't fight it," he
explains. "I think it's important, particularly in
longer-form cricket… to let your mind go [between
balls]."
The colour-blind Brad Hodge preferred to watch the ball from the bowler's hand so he could focus
on the seam © Getty Images
Blewett was the most flexible in terms of his mental

relaxation routine between balls, being happy to
choose one or more from a full menu of options: a
chat with his partner, gardening, a walk out to
square leg, a look into the crowd (to see family and
friends) or the TV and radio commentary boxes (to
see who was commentating). The one constant
element in his routine was the final stage: he took
his right-handed batting stance by putting his right
foot down before his left foot.
Hodge ends his between-balls relaxation routine

the exact same way. "I would never go in left foot
first." But before stepping into his stance, Hodge
employs a bucolic relaxation tactic that none of the
other interviewed batsmen use: he walks away from
the crease, puts his head down and looks at the
grass for around 20 seconds, "because grass is a

calming colour".
Most batsmen interviewed found the notion of

watching the ball in the bowler's hand from the top
of his mark - which, anecdotally, is how a significant
proportion of club batsmen interpret the cliché
"watch the ball" - to be utterly alien. Cowan, who
has just retired after 13 summers of Shield cricket,
has "never heard of anyone" doing it at first-class
level.
But there exists at least one who did: Brad Hodge,

who looks for the ball in the bowler's hand as he is
walking back to his mark (to try to identify the
shiny and rough sides), and when the bowler
reaches the top of his mark, visually locates the
seam of the ball in the hand, which, from that point
on, becomes the object of his central vision's focus.
Hodge is quick to point out that there are two

peculiar reasons why he developed this method.
Firstly, he's colour-blind. It's easier for him to pick
up the ball if he focuses on the seam, which is
clearly a different colour from the rest of the ball.
Hodge can't remember how he watched the ball

when he was a kid, but he knows when he became
conscious of the importance of watching the seam.
It was the summer of 1993-94. He had just broken
into Victoria's Shield team as an 18-year-old. One
day early that summer, for the first - and, as it later
turned out, only - time in his life, Hodge heard a
fellow batsman speak about how to watch the ball.
"Don't just watch the ball," said Dean Jones, "watch
the seam of the ball." Those words commanded
respect - Jones was not only Victoria's captain and
best batsman, a veteran of 52 Tests and 150 ODIs
with an average above 45 in both formats, but
Hodge's childhood hero and mentor in the
Victorian team.
The second reason why Hodge developed his

method for watching the ball is peculiar not just to
him but to all Victorian Shield batsmen: their home
ground, the MCG, has a dry, abrasive pitch that is
conducive to reverse swing. That reasoning is
consistent with that of Blewett, Burns and

Patterson, all of whom said that reverse swing
constitutes an exception to their general rule of not
watching the ball in the bowler's hand as he is
running in. However, Blewett and Patterson add,
this exception is rarely used nowadays because, as
Patterson says, "most bowlers… like to cover the
ball" as they are running in.
"I know when I'm in form and whacking

the ball, I'm watching the ball literally hit
the base of the bat"
CHRIS LYNN
Hodge is in step with the other batsmen

interviewed in that although his central vision is
focused on the seam as the bowler is running in, he
is "definitely" still able to pick up predictive clues in
the bowler's run-up and load-up with his peripheral
vision. Moreover, he observes that when he's in
good form, his focus is "more broad", meaning that
he's "not [consciously] looking for the seam" of the
ball at all, "because, for some reason, his computer
[that is, mind] will just do that naturally."
Lynn describes the state of being in good form in

very similar terms: the ball "looks like it's coming
down [in] slow motion and … it's like [your mind is]
in auto-pilot. I've had games where I think 'F***,
what happened there?' And you've done well and
you can't really remember it because it's just on
auto-pilot and it just does it itself basically."
All seven batsmen interviewed can see the seam of

the ball and the shiny and rough sides as it travels
towards them. Blewett, who batted in the top three
for the bulk of his first-class and Test career, vividly
recalls seeing "the gold writing" on the sides of new
balls as they travelled towards him. When a spinner
is bowling, all seven batsmen can see the ball
spinning in the air as it travels towards them.
Cowan points out that being able to see "how many
revolutions" the ball has as it travels towards him is

necessary for him to survive as a first-class
batsman, because many spinners - for example,
Fawad Ahmed - bowl with a scrambled seam,
making it futile to watch the seam of the ball once
they release it.
Even when the seam isn't scrambled, modern

spinners bowl balls that are so well disguised that
they can only be reliably picked by watching the
rotations of the ball in the air. Fingerspinners, for
example: Rangana Herath, R Ashwin and Steve
O'Keefe, bowl a skidding straight ball that, for all
intents and purposes, looks like their stock ball -
identical seam position, almost identical bowling
action - but is bowled with underspin rather than
the overspin and/or sidespin that characterises
their stock ball. Cowan picks that delivery - which,
in Australia, is generally referred to as a "square
ball" - by watching the ball spin backwards in the
air as it travels towards him.
Bradman was unequivocal on this point. "A

batsman," he wrote, "should be able to see the ball
turning in the air as it comes down the pitch
towards him when the bowler is a slow spinner.
This is necessary against a class googly bowler like
Arthur Mailey. Even if he disguises his googly you
still have the added insurance of watching the spin
of the ball to make sure which way it will turn on
pitching."
This quality of vision is clearly the norm for

batsmen at first-class and Test level, so much so
that Blewett is genuinely taken aback when this
writer - a bog-standard club cricketer - informs him
that he has never been able to see the ball spinning
in the air as it travels towards him. "That surprises
me," he says in a politely bewildered tone, "because
I just think that everyone's eyes are pretty similar
and that you'd just be able to see that."
Most of the seven batsmen interviewed said that

they could - in line with the scientific research
conducted by Mann, Spratford, Abernethy and
Sarpeshkar - recall seeing their bat hit the ball. "I
know when I'm in form and whacking the ball, I'm
watching the ball literally hit the base of the bat,"

says Lynn. The only two who could not recall seeing
their bat hitting the ball were Blewett and Pucovski,
but they could recall seeing it till late in its
trajectory - roughly a metre before contact.
What does watching the ball mean exactly? It is a question most batsmen grapple with their entire
careers © Getty Images
I
f a batsman has a well-honed method for
watching the ball efficiently - like all Test and
first-class batsmen do - then a substantial
body of anecdotal evidence indicates that he will be
able to see the ball well enough to smash it even if
he doesn't have 20/20 eyesight. Bradman had less
than 20/20 eyesight. Neil Harvey discovered early
in his Test career that he was short-sighted and
chose to keep playing without corrective lenses.
Barry Richards made the same discovery much
later in his career. He tried corrective lenses, but
the 20/20 vision freaked him out - he saw too much.
So he kept batting (successfully) without them.
More recently, Cowan only discovered that he was

minus 1.50 short-sighted in his third year of
university, when he sat at the back of some lecture
theatres and struggled to see the whiteboard. He
had been crowned the player of the national U-17s
carnival, represented Australia in the U-19 World
Cup, scored Sydney first-grade hundreds and
broken into the NSW Shield squad while
(unwittingly) being short-sighted enough to not be

allowed to legally drive without corrective lenses.
Even looking back on it now with 20/20 eyesight
courtesy of laser surgery, Cowan says that he had no
issues playing pace when he was short-sighted. The
only thing that troubled him was playing spin,
because he "couldn't really see the ball spin" in the
air as it travelled towards him. "The joy of playing
in Australia," he says with a chuckle, is that he just
"assumed it wasn't going to turn".
Test and first-class batsmen naturally (and

subconsciously) develop their methods of watching
the ball efficiently by playing cricket against real
bowlers from a young age. Interestingly, it appears
that becoming aware of what exactly one's method
is can dramatically improve a batsman's
performance by allowing him to use that method
more consistently. Chappell's epiphany in Hobart
at the age of 23 is the most obvious example, but
there are others.
In late March 2000, after playing 46 Tests over the

preceding five years, a 28-year-old Blewett was axed
from the Australian Test team to make way for
Matthew Hayden. Blewett went back to playing
Shield cricket. Later that year, as he was batting in
the nets at Adelaide Oval, South Australia's then
coach, Greg Chappell, asked him, "Are you watching
the ball closely?"
"Yeah, of course I am," replied Blewett.
"No, no," said Chappell, "are you really watching the

ball out of the bowler's hand?"
Blewett went away and thought about it. For the

first time in his life he became fully conscious of the
fact that he had a precise method of watching the
ball, just like Chappell had nearly three decades
earlier. From that point on, Blewett stopped
thinking about all the little technical things that he,
like so many out-of-form batsmen, had been
constantly tinkering with and said to himself: right,
just watch the ball closely out of the window of
release. "That," he recalls, "took out all my other
thoughts and all I was doing was just watching the
ball and reacting to the ball. Everything then just

happened naturally for me, which was brilliant."
Armed with that self-awareness, Blewett embarked

on the most productive period of his career, scoring
3055 first-class runs and ten hundreds, at an
average of 57.64 over the next three Australian
summers.
Elite batsmen know where the ball is going

to be before it gets there and saccade
their vision to that point. That's how they
appear to have such quick reflexes
Perhaps surprisingly, it appears that the subject of

how to watch the ball is not something that is
generally spoken about in Australian dressing
rooms. Six of the seven 21st-century Australian
batsmen interviewed could not recall the subject
being a topic of discussion in the dressing rooms
that they have been a part of. In his 24 years (and
counting) as a professional cricketer, Hodge says
that the subject of watching the ball and how to
best watch the ball has "never come up in
[conversation with] any cricketer that I know, apart
from Deano".
According to Mann, the science tells us that

explicitly telling a player (in any ball-hitting sport)
to perform the two saccades doesn't work, which is
why sports scientists instead design exercises to
naturally encourage players to perform those
saccades. For example, Mann explains that they
asked tennis players "to call out which half of the
racquet the ball hit when they hit it" and found that
"that was quite successful in improving hitting
performance".
However, at present, the science doesn't tell us

whether one ought to have explicit conversations
with batsmen about how to best watch the ball. "It's
a big question about whether we should talk about
it," says Mann. "It's something that's so implicit, is

it something that we want to raise conscious
awareness of with batters?"
None of the seven batsmen interviewed objected to

the notion of starting conversations with batsmen
about how to best watch the ball, provided that
batsmen aren't being compelled to adopt a
particular method. "You've got to be a little bit
careful about it," acknowledges Blewett. "It
depends on who you're coaching and what time of
the season it is and all that sort of stuff." That said,
he firmly believes that the subject of watching the
ball and how to best watch it is "one of the most
important things there is" for batsmen and, as a
coach, he starts conversations with them about it
all the time, typically by saying something along the
lines of, "Right, c'mon, let's make sure you're
watching the ball closely."
"The best form of coaching," observes Patterson,

"would be to just have a conversation… [that] gets
someone to think about it themselves."
Bradman would approve. The greatest batsman of

them all wrote that "the two most important pieces
of advice" that he gave young batsmen were "(a)
concentrate and (b) watch the ball."
How to do those two things is a question that every

batsman must answer for himself.
SB Tang is an Australian writer. His first book, about

Australian cricket in the '90s, will be published by Hardie
Grant later this year. @sb_tang
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.
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3/8/2018 What does a batsman see?

| The Cricket Monthly | ESPN Cricinfo

Laurence Griffiths / © Getty Images

What does a batsman see?

Combined XI for their first-class match against a Ad closed by

The younger of the two Chappells follows the

He doesn't know it, but the contents of this

Suddenly, Greg doesn't feel hungry at all. "Mate," he

What he seeks is nothing less than the answer to

and my bad days? What exactly is it that I'm doing

As he searches his mind for the answer, he enters a

There lay the answer to his question: all he had to

From that day forth, he stops mindlessly hitting

In Australia's first innings, he scores an unbeaten

Before his epiphany in Hobart, Chappell scored 243

It starts with the logical principle that mental

Bradman had less than 20/20 eyesight.

Chappell realised that he had three ascending levels

reached the face of the bowler standing at the top of

At that point, he would increase his level of

As the bowler jumped into his delivery stride, he

"There weren't too many balls that I faced that I

As soon as he finished playing a delivery - whether

"I have no doubt," Chappell says, "that what allowed

He saw that the mistake that most batsmen make,

lifelong dream of playing Test cricket for their

At club level, the mistake of trying too hard

According to Chappell's theory, that method of

Firstly, the batsman burns through his finite

Secondly, watching the ball in the bowler's hand as

Thirdly, if the batsman watches the ball in the

to shift their central vision. "It's ad hoc," says

Greg Blewett firmly believes that the

Fourthly, if the batsman focuses his gaze solely and

Thus, "watch the ball", that generic bit of advice

Indeed, one could argue that the batting maxim

strands of research have emerged to support

The first strand consists of two empirical studies.

A key finding from these two empirical studies is

When they were facing anything shorter than a full

Watching the ball actually involves a certain amount of

They were also able to maintain their gaze at the

The superior ability to accurately perform the two

As a matter of logic, in order for the elite batsmen's

is going to be (so that they can saccade their vision

Think about that for a moment. Such an ability

That predictive ability is - as Chappell theorised 46

The second strand of research lending support to

What Chappell seeks is nothing less than

The scientists then tested the batsmen's

The results they obtained were interesting. With

The batsmen's accuracy in calling out whether the

+1.00 somehow made them better," says Mann. "It

The Cricket Monthly spoke to six active professional

Lynn, Cowan, Patterson, Pucovski and Blewett's

This slight difference may stem from the fact that,

"I used to really focus on [the ball] in the bowler's

Thus, that evening in Shaw Park, Burns "naturally"

looked specifically at the bowler's face as he ran in,

Blewett's point of focus is similar, although not

Cowan does not consciously watch

"So much is picked up in those cues," observes

Similarly, despite not consciously watching