Why fast bowling remains one of cricket’s most exhilarating spectacles

There is no more exhilarating sight in cricket than that of a fast bowler running in to deliver the ball, except, that is, if you are the person holding the bat.

In my youth, I faced one of England’s fastest bowlers of the time. I barely saw the ball, let alone possessed the hand-eye coordination to make a proper reaction to play an intended shot.

It is, therefore, unimaginable what it would have been like to face the fastest bowler ever recorded. In 2002, Shoaib Akhtar, known as the Rawalpindi Express, became the first bowler to break the 100 miles per hour barrier, equivalent to 161.3 kilometers per hour. His achievement still stands.

A radar gun has been used since 1999 to calculate bowling speeds in international matches and some first-class matches.

A gun is mounted on a pole located next to the sight screen behind the boundary and behind the bowler. It measures the speed of the ball from one end of the pitch to the other, in comparable manner to how the speed of a motor vehicle is calculated. Speeding tickets were first introduced in the late 1940s in the US, but it was some time before speed-gun technology arrived in sport.

First it was baseball in the 1970s, to measure speed of pitch, then tennis in 1989, to calculate the speed of service. It was another 10 years before cricket adopted the technology.

The gun transmits a microwave beam toward the entire distance of the pitch and detects the movement of any object along with the pitch. Spectators, coaches, analysts, and players can see the ball-speed calculation displayed on screen.

Sceptics are apt to point out that the speed gun is not 100 percent accurate, suggesting that Akhtar may not have achieved 100 mph. He said: “It doesn’t matter to me whether