To Manage a Good Wicket

Ruthless competition and huge expectations from the team-made technology
adoption critical for Team India

The eve of an important
one-day tie against South Africa makes Bangalore's Chinnaswamy cricket stadium
unfurl its technology-savvy repute-high definition cameras, security consoles,
a beaming giant screen, and Microsoft Media Centre PCs that would now make its
corporate boxes 'intelligent'.

Intelligence is playing a role inside the
busy Indian dressing room too, where boss Chappell has just finished a meet and
young Kaif is as restless as when he is on the crease. A relatively known face,
sighted over the last two seasons, sits tensed with an unusually heavy looking
laptop. His mobile phone rings every 10 seconds. “I am under tremendous
pressure,” he says. “Everybody wants tickets. I am just a support staff.
Where do I get so many tickets from?”

The BCCI calls this support staff a
'video analyst', but by all accounts, he is Indian cricket's last word in
technology evaluation and usage, the de facto CIO whose role in Team India now
exceeds the initial intent.

S Ramakrishnan, or Ramki as he lovingly
called, has been responsible for all IT aid the Men in Blue have recently got
and his employer-Chennai-based Meeru Sports Technologies-have been in the
forefront of revolutionizing the way coaching is done, even at the grassroots
level in India. So, when BCCI engaged this company for providing the national
cricket team a much-needed tech hand a few years ago, it supplied sophisticated
gadgets for performance analysis. But these devices still needed a service round
it and a consultant who could channelise the data generated into a central
repository, data mining for the coach when required. Our CIO, a former Ranji
Trophy player, was a straight jacket fit, having the right domain expertise and
an equally good technical know-how.

His contribution to the Indian cricket
team's success in the last couple of years is relative, but cannot be fudged
altogether either, going by the appreciation Tendulkar or Dravid heave on him
from time to time, particularly after a series win. He has supported the
team's intelligence well, gave John Wright (and now Chappell) an aid to detect
holes in the opposition's wall and improve India's edge, its mental
vigilance. This 'analyst' has become a near permanent fixture in Team India
now, also because it can ill afford to ignore what most other countries
(including Bangaladesh) are rigorously practicing and promoting for competitive
advantage. And in times when cricketers jump from playing one-dayers to test
matches in no time, there is more to be seen by the coach than his naked eye can
probably find.

The Silicon Aid

“The shift from one-day to test cricket plays havoc with your technique. In
one-dayers, you are not worried about technique-it is stand and perform. Small
differences creep into a player's technique that are not visible to the human
eye,” Ramki tells. To begin with, it is here that technology plays a huge
part. Naked eye coaching, thus, has its own limitations. Chappell might miss a
few balls with technical deficiencies or an error in the batsman's footwork.
Ramki, therefore, uses a software called Silicon Coach, a video-based motion
analysis system, for studying techniques.

So, what does it do? First and foremost,
error deduction, that helps you analyze why and how it happens, leading to a
solution for the error. So, if a bowler is moving away from the crease during
delivery, by how many degrees has he moved? If he is improving, has he reduced
this degree? The software helps one to measure speed, distance, and time in
milliseconds; has speed and distance graphs for calculating the release speed of
the ball, the acceleration in the run up, the pre-delivery leap among others. It
can be used for any sport for that matter-any activity that involves body
movements.

Silicon Coach re-stresses how important a
medium video is, making players look different than they think they are. “A
player now knows what he is doing and what his coach wants him to do. As with
all visual forms of teaching, his retention level is much higher,” Ramki says.

It is easy to set up and equally easy to
use, he tells. There is a digital camera, which is connected to the laptop
through a fire wire cable. The video is captured to the hard disk. “We usually
have two cameras-one that films a player from his front side and the other
from the sides. For any particular delivery, therefore, we have two angles.
There can be four split screens on the laptop to see the improvement levels in a
player in four months,” he explains.

While Meeru Sports was the first to
introduce this computerized video analysis tool for sports in India. In 2000, a
New Zealand-based bio mechanist originally developed the solution. Ramki,
however, has provided lot of inputs towards consequent product development for
the same.

Additional Tech Gear

Meeru's, and for that matter Ramki's, technology aid to the Indian cricket
team does not end here. The second device that Team India uses is Timewarp-a
feedback and instant monitoring tool as opposed to Silicon Coach's analysis
capabilities. Once the initial screening with Silicon is done, the player works
on the coaches' suggestions and therefore, requires feedback. If a bowler for
example, has been asked to bring his hand down during delivery in a particular
angle, he can now bowl and take a look at his video straightaway. “We can set
a delay where the picture of event will appear in the laptop only after five to
10 seconds. So, the bowler can walk back to the run up, see it and discuss with
the coach,” Ramki says. Both Silicon and Timewarp are mainly used during net
practice sessions.

How Tech-Savvy are Our Cricketers?

Flamboyant wicketkeeper-batsman Dhoni is as fast at computer games as he is in scoring runs. Rookie JP Yadav is more into music. In fact, most of Team India carries an iPod and laptops that stores everything from film DVDs to inspirational stuff. Since everybody has portable devices, Ramki is exploring how it can be used for mental preparation before a game. "All players have their own way to prepare for a match. Some hear inspirational songs. If they can see their own inspirational moments on a portable devices, it should also help," he says. So the plan is to provide players with inspirational clips, videos of their best moments on a portable device to be viewed privately. "We have, for example, the iRiver, which can load videos. You can also connect this to the TV," he explains.

Besides, there is the indigenously
developed match analysis software ScoreMate, a tool that the Indian cricket team
has been using for the last eight months. It captures all the events during a
match along with the video, something than can be databased. So if someone wants
to see a particular batsman facing a particular bowler, it can be retrieved from
the database easily later. “We saw Sehwag's triple century in Pakistan in 15
minutes. If you want to see just boundaries, you can select and see just that.
If you want to see the deliveries where he was beaten and that too to a
particular bowler, even that can be data mined. It captures all the events and
you can later query from the database to get the reports,” he says.

This software helps a coach to quickly
analyze and send in reports to the players during matches. If a bowler for
example, has to ideally bowl on the off-stump to a batsman and drifts away to
the middle stump consistently, the coach can, during the drinks break, point out
to the new cluster. 3D features, which Meeru is trying to built into this
system, will make it even better.

ScoreMate though has competitors
globally. There is similar software that Australia uses and yet another one
developed and used by New Zealand's analyst Zach Hitchcock. But India, says
Ramki, was no laggard when it came to technology adoption. All teams adopted
these software pretty much around the same time-1999-2000. What was important,
particularly to India, was the fact that it needed a coach who could read
through all these reports. That happened first, with John Wright and now,
Chappell. Most Indian coaches don't know how to operate a computer even. 

Meeru's analysis tool anyway can be
used for non-televised games as well. It was the first to introduce this in
Ranji Trophy cricket last year for a match between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka and
in an India under-19 series against England. Some of its tools have also been
licensed to the ICC and the Asian Cricket Council.

The market for such devices though
remains fragmented with no estimates known or calculable. The potential looks
huge if analysis devices can permeate down to district and school level and
spread to sports beyond cricket in India. One ScoreMate license sells for about
$3000 today. The Silicon Coach is priced at Rs 75,000 and the Timewrap comes
cheapest at $350.

But still it may not be enough to
interest many companies or software giants to explore waters. Microsoft's
could be a different story. It has a lot of Indian employees and has documented
what it can do for the Indian cricket team and Ramki again, is very much
involved in its evaluation. “Microsoft's Media Center PC can become a great
feedback tool with customization, mostly because of its pause and re-play
features,” Ramki opines.

The company set up two 17-inch machines
for the third umpire and the match referee for live feed during the India-South
Africa match in Bangalore recently. The Media Center PCs put up at the corporate
boxes in the stadium allowed spectators to watch their own replays. 

-Goutam Das in
Bangalore  

goutamd@cybermedia.co.in