A close look at the perceived increase in swing with the old ball at IPL 2025.

As my pre-teen would say, "I call cap!"

medium.com/boundary-lin...

With pitch conditions evolving over a long IPL season over multiple venues, this will be a key topic.

Using this data with ball tracking can be powerful.

One can be greedy & ask for more fidelity around ball tracking but we can leave that to another time & stick w/ baby steps.

Surely, pitch curators must be using these and more at some stage of pitch preparation.

We've been stuck in the era of sticking keys in wickets and knocking on them for far too long.

Enable the experts with more information!

It's surprising that soil compaction and humidity sensors haven't been leveraged to "read the wicket" and gain a competitive edge.

There's plenty of discourse on pitch analysis in the context of toss decisions. While this can be relevant, its true value lies in selection, deployment, and arsenal usage (player level).

Taking a holistic value perspective might help prioritize improvements in "reading" the wkt

Steve Smith's career from an aging curve perspective.

He's had a more rapid decline than the average 10K club batter.

But he has company in the 10K club...

1999 - Tendulkar 's first test double hundred

Update Thread: I have decided to take a break from my role with Zelus Analytics supporting @rajasthanroyals.bsky.social. I'll continue to work independently to understand the game better, publish my work and be on the lookout for opportunities to work w/ leadership at teams & in the media.

The visual here reminded me of a piece I did several years ago where I used a graph representation to assess "momentum"
Something like this can be done for Tests, but we'd probably want to look at a longer period than 1yr.
tinyurl.com/4emjctuk