Cricket is coming...

[mrlloyd]

The Ashes starts soon. And it says something about the arcane nature of cricket that the discussion isn't whether or not England's bowlers will cope with the pitches. Oh no. It's got more to do with how they'll deal with the air.

There's also the fascinating business of swing bowling, a technique which makes the ball behave with apparent disregard

Comments

[undyingking]

I suspect "late reverse swing" may actually be some sort of kung fu technique.

[mrlloyd]

How the hell does late swing work anyway?

I'd assume the flight of the ball would be pretty consistent once it leaves the hand. Does the bowler apply some sort of weak effect that suppresses the swing until half way down the wicket?

Magic, I reckon. In decades to come people will make pilgrimages to the Himalayas, where retired Pakistani bowlers will impart the mystery of S'wing. Anderson will be doing something similar from a monastary in Yorkshire.

[undyingking]

It might be to do with trajectory -- the swing effect is put on at such an angle that it only starts to significantly influence the ball's movement once the overall trajectory has fallen below a certain angle as the ball dips towrads the pitch (ie. the angle of the seam to the air it's moving through passes beyond some critical value). I can't work out exactly the physics of that, but I can see how it might work.

(One of the sad things about physics is that you soon learn that any macroscopic problem involving fluid dynamics is practically impossible to predict, let alone calculate.)