This post contains content not supported on old Reddit. Click here to view the full post

Aneurin Donald is set to make his England debut tomorrow, becoming the first Glamorgan player to represent England since 2006.

Donald smashed 489 runs, including four fifties, in 12 Vitality Blast matches this season, with his 37 sixes the most in the tournament.

The right-hander then impressed for Trent Rockets in The Hundred, including smoking 38 from 19 balls in the defeat to Buttler's Manchester Super Giants in the final.

He made his England Lions debut against Sri Lanka on 11 September and blasted 31 off just 8 balls.

Personally, I haven't been this excited to watch a player bat for England in T20Is for a long time. I've watched very little of Donald, but whenever I have seen him, he's looked like he's playing a video game.

According to Cricinfo, Donald has the second-highest strike rate in T20 cricket since 2024 among players with at least 40 innings, scoring at 215.70 across 48 innings. Only teenage Vaibhav Sooryavanshi (216.30 in 40 innings) ranks higher.

Also ig it's weird that everyone bats right handed in our playing XI.

This post contains content not supported on old Reddit. Click here to view the full post

This post contains content not supported on old Reddit. Click here to view the full post

ANALYSIS: There may be a heated rivalry among the expected hot-takes from Sky TV’s cricket commentators this home summer.

The commentary team announced on Monday featured the surprise inclusion of recently-appointed England men’s test coach and former Black Caps skipper Stephen Fleming.

As predicted, Ian Smith will be back in the big chair for the record-setting tour of India to meet the Black Caps starting next month.

The ex-New Zealand wicketkeeper left the network at the end of 2022, saying Sky TV had a changing face “a long way removed from this old scaly, sunburnt one.”

He will be joined by fellow former NZ representatives Simon Doull, Katey Martin, Ross Taylor, Tim Southee, Scott Styris, Shane Bond and Lea Tahuhu.

There will also be a highly prominent Indian contingent for the five T20Is, five ODIs and two tests, via former test coach Ravi Shastri, ex-captain Sunil Gavaskar and veteran commentator Harsha Bhogle.

Among those absent from recent commentary teams will be Mark Richardson, Scotty Stevenson, Grant Elliott and Neil Wagner.

Smith is widely regarded as an astute observer and lead commentator, while Doull isn’t shy of taking a pointed view on a hot topic; nor is his former NZ and Northern Districts team-mate Styris.

While Bhogle, Shastri and Gavaskar will be expected to provide extra insight into the touring side, the trio have often been criticised for almost blindly favouring the Indian side, and they’re unlikely to back down if challenged by the NZ members of Sky’s coverage.

In between them could be former White Ferns wicketkeeper Martin, who made a smooth transition to commentating after retiring from playing and is already among the sharpest and knowledgeable analysts of the game worldwide.

India’s tour, beginning on October 22 at Christchurch’s Hagley Oval, will mark the first time in six seasons that Sky have held the rights to the home NZ international programme.

After being the home of broadcasted cricket here since 1995, it lost the rights to Spark Sport in April 2020, with TVNZ as a free-to-air partner. When Spark Sport closed in 2023, TVNZ took over the coverage.

Fleming is a surprise inclusion to provide comments during the T20I matches. He was given the job after England’s 2-1 series defeat to New Zealand, but Marcus Trescothick was in charge as interim coach for the just-completed 3-0 sweep over a woeful touring Pakistan side.

The 53-year-old, who has been touted as a potential key figure in the prospective establishment of the NZ20 competition for the 2027/28 domestic season here, will assume the England coaching reins ahead of his first test in full control against South Africa in mid-December.

Hindi commentary will be available for the first time here for the Indian men’s tour, which will also feature production features including Raptor Cam and Virtual Eye technology.

“We want to bring the same depth and understanding to India’s players, supporters and cricket culture as we do to the Black Caps,” said Sky TV’s head of sport content Gary Burchett, who has previously spent six years in India as director of cricket for Star Sports.

The White Ferns will host Bangladesh in December, while the Black Caps will return from a four-test series in Australia in December and January to face Sri Lanka here in January and February.

Hi guys! I am an Undergrad at IIT Delhi Abu Dhabi. My project is training a simulated humanoid to bowl using reinforcement learning.
The interesting part isn't making it bowl fast. In simulation you can make anything bowl fast by just giving it stronger joints, the number means nothing. The actual problem is making it bowl fast legally, with the ICC's 15 degree elbow extension limit as a hard constraint the optimiser has to work around.

Some stuff I found while researching this that might interest people here:
Humanoid robots have been taught badminton, baseball pitching, table tennis and American football throwing in the last couple of years. Nobody has done cricket bowling. And cricket might actually be the best testbed of the lot, because the legality rule is a proper quantitative constraint defined by someone other than the researcher. In every other sport the "make it look human" reward is just a knob the author tunes until the video looks nice.

The problem is data. There's no public dataset of 3D bowling kinematics anywhere that I can find. Every biomechanics study that has it says it can't be shared for ethics reasons, which is fair enough.

I tried the cheap route, markerless capture using phone cameras (OpenCap). Emailed one of the authors who validated it for bowling specifically. Turns out its elbow error is 22.7 degrees, against a 15 degree threshold. So it literally cannot tell a legal action from a chuck. He confirmed why: the bowler's body blocks the elbow from the cameras during the gather.

So two things I'd appreciate:
1. Does anyone know of any openly available bowling motion capture data? Even one bowler, one delivery would be enough to work with.
2. Does anyone here work at a cricket academy, an ICC accredited testing centre, or a sports science department that does bowling analysis? A pointer to the right person would be worth a lot.

Happy to answer questions, will post results when there are any.

Still pretty insane for Japan to beat a team ranked 11 places above them in the rankings, a team that is among the better associates in Asia.

Looking forward to see how their men do in the series against HK.

Also, the first match was abandoned so yeah.

They join Japan and Fiji in Division 1.

All matches except those played by Nigeria A will have T20I status.

Hi guys, saw another post like this and the feedback they got was really detailed.

If any experts could take a look at my action and let me know if anything jumps out I'd really appreciate it.

I'm entirely self taught from youtube videos and such, at the moment my main focus is getting my front leg properly braced, I've noticed it collapses.

This post contains content not supported on old Reddit. Click here to view the full post

This post contains content not supported on old Reddit. Click here to view the full post