Fast bowlers have not hit a new peak – they’ve just reached a plateau | Andy Bull

There is a school of thought that bowlers such as England’s Jofra Archer are bound to be faster now, simply because of the advances in sport science – reality suggests something different

At 96mph the ball travels from the bowler to the batsman in the bat of an eyelid. Really. At that speed a batsman has around 0.4sec to play with which, most studies seem to agree, also happens to be how long it takes to blink. But that 0.4sec is only a fag-packet calculation. The true number would allow for the ball’s deceleration and its journey down into the pitch and up away from it, but still, we are dealing with the tiny margins, tenths and hundredths, that a batsman has to spot the length, the line, make up his mind, and then play a shot. So near the top of the accelerometer, cricket begins to seem almost physically impossible.

At that speed strange things start to happen, for the batsman, the bowler, and the spectators. Time begins to both speed up and slow down, as though someone’s sitting on the remote. Our sense of it gets elastic. On Saturday Steve Smith, who, with his Heath Robinson batting technique, usually seems to have so much time to work in, was all of a sudden so short of it he could not even make it halfway through a shot before the ball was on him. And then when he fell, everything slowed right down again, as the crowd fell silent and minds filled with a flood of awful thoughts.

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