In the indoor school at Hove a young Zimbabwean called Tawanda Muyeye is batting against three of Sussex’s best young spinners, Jack Carson, Will Collard and Abdullah Nazir. Their coach, Richard Halsall, is at the bowler’s end with a tablet in one hand. It is linked to a camera above his head, and a couple of big TV screens on one wall. Halsall is tagging every delivery, noting whether Muyeye middled each shot or not. The clips are immediately uploaded to an app Halsall has designed, which means that seconds later Sussex’s batting coach, Muyeye’s school coach, and his parents will all be able to watch the footage on their phones, and see for themselves how well he is playing today.

Halsall took over as Sussex’s academy director last summer. He has spent most of the past decade working in international cricket, first as England’s fielding coach, then as Bangladesh’s assistant coach, but before that he was a schoolteacher. “I did 10 years of teaching and 10 years of international cricket,” he says, “and this is a merger of the two.”

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His track record in the game has earned him a lot of credit with Sussex, and he is using it to radically overhaul the way they run their youth cricket. If he can prove that what he is doing works, it will change the way we teach the game in England.

When Halsall took over at the academy there were two big problems he wanted to fix. The first was a lack of communication between all the people – “I should call them stakeholders,” Halsall says, “but I hate that word” – involved in a player’s development: their parents, school coaches, club coaches and county coaches. Which meant that players were getting mixed and conflicting messages about what they ought to be doing. The second was that he felt so much of the decision-making was still based on opinion rather than fact. And he hated that.

“This goes back to my time teaching,” Halsall says. “I’d have a parents evening every term and I had to sit in front of parents and tell them how their child was doing.” It had to be rigorous. “He got this mark in this test and that mark in that test, he’s been handing in his prep on time, he’s always asking me questions in the classroom, he’s logged into the library 45 times this term and he’s accessed these books, so I know he’s been doing his stuff. I couldn’t just say: ‘Well in my opinion your son’s not good enough.’ But in cricket it was still fine to do that.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The app designed by Richard Halsall enables deliveries and shots to be recorded and uploaded for instant replay via a tablet or phone. Photograph: Jonny Weeks/The Guardian

Halsall is not someone who pretends to have answers he doesn’t, and he readily admits he does not think he, or anyone else, can really pick out which 13-year-old is going to go on to play international cricket. So he was not comfortable with how many people Sussex were cutting from their development programme. It was shaped like a pyramid, with a lot of young players at the bottom and a handful of colts at the top. Halsall has scrapped that. He wants to keep as many people on the pathway for as long as he can. There are 580 boys involved now. Next year it will go up to 800. The idea is that Sussex will not just be turning out county players but committed club players.

Each and every one of them has a profile on the app Halsall has designed. So do all Sussex’s professional staff. Which means that so long as someone who is nearby has a camera linked to the app, even if it is just a mate recording with a smartphone, everything a player does in the net or during a match can be captured, tagged and graded. The app clocks whether or not a batsman has middled a shot, and whether a bowler would have hit the top of off. Research done by the England and Wales Cricket Board, and by Halsall, shows that these two simple, sensible, measures are the best basic indicators of a young player’s quality.

Over a season, Sussex will build up a huge library of clips, and a huge quantity of data, on every player. Which means, for instance, that their spin coach Ian Salisbury can watch how a young legspinner is getting on in a Melbourne club game this winter, add a note to his profile about a refinement he might make to his technique, then share it with the player, his parents and his club coaches. Or if Chris Silverwood, England’s bowling coach, wants to check in on how Chris Jordan has been bowling in the nets while he is away playing in the Pakistan Super League, all he needs to do is pick up his phone and open Jordan’s profile on the app.

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All that data also means that where once a young batsman might just have had to suck up a coach’s opinion that he was being dropped because he was not any good against spin bowling, now they can both look at the app and check exactly how well he has been playing the sweep, or how often he has been using his feet. The app includes links to videos of coaching drills, so, with another click, the player can watch clips of how to practise a particular skill and then get on with working on it themselves. Halsall is even building in tags to measure character, that capture, for example, moments when a player was celebrating a teammate’s success.

Halsall says he wants to “democratise everything”, that “it’s not going to be my opinion that determines whether you’re going to get to get selected for the next level”, that, in fact, everyone on the app, from the England coaches down to the school coaches, will all be in the same loop. He has been working closely with Mo Bobat, the ECB’s head of player identification, who is a fan of what he is doing. Now Halsall hopes the ECB will roll out his system across the counties. “I will not get my head round if they don’t say to every county this has to be in your indoor school by the end of the year.”