By Crispin Andrews

Ashes series in Australia, have usually been won by the team who has the best fast bowlers, but this time around, Australia and England are both working to keep a fit fast bowling attack on the field.

Australian fast bowlers James Pattinson and Nathan Coulter-Nile are out of this summer’s Ashes series with lower back stress fractures. So too, England’s Toby Roland Jones. Two more England quicks, Jake Ball and Steven Finn recently strained ankle ligaments while England’s fastest bowler, Mark Wood, was left out of their squad after missing most of the Northern summer with foot and ankle injuries.

Of those fast bowlers competing in the first two tests, Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood, Pat Cummins and Chris Woakes have all missed games injured, in recent months. It’s the same, elsewhere in the cricketing world. South Africa, who will host Australia for test matches in March 2018, have had a whole fast bowling attack, Dale Steyn, Morne Morkel, Vernon Philander and Chris Morris, out injured in recent months.

Today’s cricketers are on nutritional programmes and drink less alcohol in a year than some of their predecessors put away in a week. They spend more hours working on their fitness in the gym than the likes of Dennis Lillee, Jeff Thomson and John Snow, ever did. And on honing their bowling actions to avoid putting strain on their bodies. Sports scientists and strength and conditioning coaches support modern players with the best technology, cricket boards can afford. When Lillee and Thomson played, the coach was something that took the players from the hotel to the ground.

However, whilst previous generations of fast bowlers had long winter breaks, rested between and sometimes, during, Test matches, and played mostly five or four day cricket, with only a few one dayers; these days, international cricketers play all year round. Test series, one-dayers and T20 matches are crammed into much shorter time slots and players have to switch back and forth between the different formats.

"It’s like a marathon runner, stopping their preparation for the Olympics to do a few hundred metre sprints," says Alex Kountouris, Cricket Australia’s Sports Science and Medicine Manager.

Today’s fast bowlers also have to be athletic fielders. Gone are the days when Thommo or Snowy could relax on the boundary between overs.

But, while changes in the game of cricket have made it more important for fast bowlers to be super fit, societal changes make it increasingly difficult for young fast bowlers to attain and sustain that level of fitness.

Growing up in the 1960s and further back, kids were outside a lot, moving around, gradually, over many years, strengthening their muscles, joints and bones. Good preparation for fast bowling.

"It takes a young fast bowler, brought up in more sedentary modern times, hundreds of hours in the gym to reach the same fitness level that their predecessors attained through general, everyday activity," says former ECB physiologist, Nigel Stockhill.

What causes injuries?

Alex Kountouris explains that injuries tend to happen when the body can’t handle the forces generated during bowling. This could be too much rotation in the spine as the bowler goes through their action. Or excessive side and lateral flexion during delivery.

"In general, those who bowl faster generate more forces, so they’re higher risk," Kountouris says.

Bowlers like Pat Cummins and Mark Wood, who are often injured, have explosive, slingy, actions that generate a lot of forces. Josh Hazlewood and England’s Stuart Broad, who are injured less often, run over the crease, a bit like Glenn McGrath used to, which creates less force. McGrath wasn’t injured that much either.

"If everything is well aligned and working in coordination, then there are less forces on different parts of the body," Kountouris says. "If a bowler’s spine is twisted when they’re generating those forces, then a lot of the force will go through bones in the spine and that’s when lower back stress fractures occur."

Cricket Australia and England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) analysts use a Vicon motion capture system to measure the forces generated during bowling. Players have markers on their body when they bowl. Cameras pick up information and feed the data into a computer programme which makes stick figure animations of the bowler’s technique.

"From this, we can measure body angles and tell whether the forces are going straight up or across the bowler’s body," Kountouris says.

He adds that force plates on the ground helps the analysts determine how much force impacts a bowler’s body as a proportion of their body weight.

Modern technology

The ECB is looking at other causes of lower back injuries, the most common fast bowling ailment. They have discovered, according to biomechanist, Pete Alway, that the players who injure their lower back aren’t necessarily those who bowl with excessive side flexion, or hip to shoulder counter-rotation.

Alway, based at Loughborough University, the site of the ECB’s National Performance Centre, has been using wearable sensors to measure bowlers’ posture, joint mobility – particularly ankles and shoulders – muscle flexibility and endurance, aerobic fitness and hamstring length. By studying players who haven’t picked up back injuries as well as those who have, the ECB hopes to find the key factors that cause these injuries.

ECB experts also use an MRI scanner to observe stress reactions in bowlers’ bodies, a precursor of stress fracture and muscle development in the player’s trunk. The ECB also has a Lunar iDXA body scanner, more commonly used in osteoporosis detection and diagnosis to monitor player’s bone health, bone mineral density and content in the player’s lumber spine.

Both CA and ECB are looking into another potential cause of injury in fast bowlers, the intensity of their workload in matches and practice.

ECB analysts use micro sensors attached to a player’s back to monitor the bowler’s run up speed, delivery stride. Experts from the Australian Catholic University’s School of Exercise Science have designed a wearable technology containing an accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer motion sensors that measure the effort a bowler puts in, each ball.

‘If we know what the bowler’s maximum intensity delivery is, the fastest or hardest ball they’ve ever bowled, then the GPS can pick up the overall percentage they are bowling at any one time, in training.’ Alex Kountouris says. ‘We don’t want bowlers going from 60 percent intensity indoors, during training, to maximum intensity outdoors. We need to make sure that they build up to that maximum intensity in training.’

Last November, Cricket Australia released figures from the last twenty years, showing that 23.2% of fast bowlers will be out injured at any one time, much to the annoyance of former players, Damien Fleming and Gavin Robertson, who questioned current methods and suggested CA looks back at how previous generations of quicks went about their work. Kountouris says the data shows that fast bowlers got injured as much back then, as they do now and that his job is to help bowlers adapt to the modern game, where, it seems, injuries are unavoidable.

Despite all the injury problems, the Australian team for the first Ashes Test, still contained a formidable trio of fast bowlers. Brisbane 2017-18, however, was the first time that Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood and Pat Cummins have played a Test match together. Since Hazlewood made his debut in 2014, one or more of them has been out injured in every Test match Australia has played.

If, as seems likely, given current trends, one of these three breaks down during the series; with so many back up bowlers injured, a newcomer might come in, someone like, Jason Behrendorf or Joel Paris. Maybe one of these promising left arm quicks could have the sort of stunning Ashes debuts that their West Australian fast bowling predecessors, Dennis Lillee, Bob Massie and Terry Alderman enjoyed, many years ago. Or at least, they might, if Behrendorf hadn’t just gone down with a sore back and Paris, wasn’t still in the early stages of his comeback after being out of action for a year with shin and quadriceps injuries.

[A bowler's action is analysed using motion capture technology at Loughborough University. Photo: Vicon]