Cricket FAQ

The reads listed on the cricket card in Motion Lab are front-knee bend, head over your base at contact, finish balance, staying tall on the back foot and backlift to contact timing. They are estimates from a single phone camera, so treat them as a picture of your movement rather than a lab measurement.

Only some of them are graded, on starter ranges that have not been checked against real batters yet; how cricket clips are graded lists which. There is no cricket fault detector, and nothing reads the ball: no line, length, pace or spin. Bowling is not read at all.

A Front-Foot Shot grades your front-knee bend, your head over your front knee at contact and your finish balance. A Back-Foot Shot grades your head over your back knee at contact, your finish balance and staying tall. Every other read is shown as measured, not graded, and rotation, power, sequencing and timing are not scored for cricket.

The ranges are a starting point written for cricket, not borrowed from another sport, but they have not yet been fitted to real batting clips, and there is no cricket fault detector. A clip saved before front- and back-foot shots existed stays ungraded.

The weakest graded read can become your one fix, with a cricket drill. You can also get a focus from how you got out, covered in where your cricket fix comes from.

A fix from video rests on starter ranges that have not been checked against real batters yet, and there is no cricket fault detector, so it points at the position that read weakest, not at a diagnosed fault.

A dismissal can have more than one cause, so the focus Start picks is the most likely starting point, not a certainty. Getting bowled, for example, can come from a gap between bat and pad or from playing across the line. That result is an estimate from what you reported, and it says so. Its retest is reported too: after practising, you say whether the problem has eased.

Side-on shows the front-foot stride and the downswing most clearly. A net, a bowling machine or a batting tee all work, as long as the camera sits behind the netting and never in the line of the ball.

Use 60fps if your phone offers it and keep the camera still on a prop or tripod. The bat moves fast through contact, and a shaky or slow clip blurs the phase you most want to see.

If you bat as well, film a batting stroke instead. Problems you report on Start are batting problems too, such as getting bowled, out LBW or struggling against spin, so the focus you get is always about your batting.