Federal Minister for Science and Technology Fawad Chaudhry is confident about producing ‘smart cricket balls’ in Pakistan.
Chaudhry believes that the Sialkot-based manufacturers, famous for producing finest-quality sports goods, are more than capable of producing such a cricket ball locally.
It must be noted that a partnership between Kookaburra Sports and SportCor, which takes a regular Kookaburra cricket ball and embeds a SportCor electronic chip inside the core of the ball, led to the production of Kookaburra SmartBall back in August 2019. Although, it is still in the testing phase and not used for international cricket matches.
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It enables data and information to flow from inside the ball that’s being bowled. The chip inside the core transmits information from the ball back to a phone/tablet app. The chip can currently measure the speed and revolutions of the ball at different stages of its journey from the hand of a bowler.
The SmartBall can also gather information on pitch behaviour from pre and post bounce data, while future capabilities include information on whether a bat has definitively nicked a ball, whether the ball has hit the grass on low catches, and improved tracking for Decision Review System (DRS).