Rear leg kinematics and kinetics in cricket fast bowling

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to analyse the kinematics and kinetics of the rear leg drive in fast bowling, and then investigate whether any of these variables were associated with ball release speed. Eighteen young fast bowlers (17.2 ± 1.7 years) were recruited from the Cricket New South Wales development squad, and their bowling actions were captured by a Cortex 2.0 motion analysis system (200 Hz). Bivariate Pearson's product-movement correlation coefficients were calculated in SPSS (Version 17.0) to assess the relationships between wrist speed (of the bowling hand) and the kinematics and kinetics variables corresponding with rear leg motion. A number of kinematic variables were correlated with bowling wrist speed, most of them during the delivery stride, including mean thigh extension angular velocity (r = 0.606, p = 0.008), thigh adduction angular velocity at back foot contact (r = 0.515, p = 0.029) and maximum change in knee extension angular velocity (r = 0.559, p = 0.016). This study also showed that rear leg drive was not an actively actuated process. Instead, the hip and knee motions in the flexion–extension and adduction–abduction planes were generally subjected to controlled and negligible torque motion-effects.

Keywords::

• cricket
• bowling
• rear leg drive, torque motion-effect, kinematics, kinetics

Acknowledgements

We thank Bob Beretta, the developer of the Mathematica Mechanical Systems Pack (Dynamic Modeling), for his expert advice on modelling in this dynamics software package.