How fast is a cricket ball? Speeds by type of bowler, from hand to bat

Cricket ball speed by type of bowler

Each row is what a tested group bowled in a published study, or a widely quoted reference point, from the slowest bowlers to the fastest. The study figures are measured at or near release in testing, not read off a broadcast speed gun, and the groups were selected bowlers, so read them as what good bowlers of each type achieve.

Juniors are left out because their speed rises steeply with age; average bowling speed by age collects the junior studies.

How a cricket ball slows from hand to bat

A ball is fastest as it leaves the hand. Air resistance slows it all the way down the pitch, and it loses more speed when it bounces. Two published estimates agree about the air and disagree about the bounce.

Writing for Sky Sports, the statistician Benedict Bermange says a 90 mph (145 km/h) delivery drops to about 80 mph (129 km/h) before pitching and to 72 mph (116 km/h) once it has hit the pitch: by our arithmetic, about 11% lost in the air and another 10% at the bounce.

Rod Cross, a physicist at the University of Sydney, estimates that air resistance slows the ball by about 12% by the time it lands, which agrees, but that it loses a further 30% or 40% at the bounce, depending on the speed of the pitch and the angle at which the ball lands. In his example, a ball bowled at 150 km/h arrives at the batter’s end about 0.46 s later, travelling at about 85 km/h.

So the two estimates agree on roughly a tenth lost in the air and disagree about the bounce. That is why our bowling speed calculator applies no correction to a frame count, and why a speed shown on television, which is a release speed, is the highest figure you will see for any delivery.

How long a batter has to react

At 140 km/h a ball released about 18.5 m from the batter’s stumps would reach them in 0.476 s if it kept its speed. Two things change that: the ball slows after release, which adds a little time, and the batter usually meets it at or in front of the popping crease, 1.22 m before the stumps, which takes some away. The table shows the times at several speeds.

Reaction takes up a large share of that time. Filmed batting on a specially prepared pitch that made the ball move unpredictably, international batters showed reaction times of around 200 ms, similar to those measured in the laboratory (McLeod, 1987). In 200 ms a 140 km/h ball travels about 7.8 m, by our arithmetic. A good length for a quick bowler is traditionally about 6–8 m from the stumps (Leamon, 2018); at 140 km/h the ball would cover that last stretch in 0.15–0.21 s if it kept its speed, about one reaction time. The speed lost at the bounce adds some time, by an amount the two estimates above disagree on, but a batter who waited for the bounce before starting to react would still be short of time.

Batters cope by predicting. Recording their eye movements, Land and McLeod (2000) found that batters see the ball for little more than half a second, make a predictive eye movement to the place where they expect it to bounce, and then follow it for 100–200 ms after the bounce. A short delay before that first eye movement distinguished good batters from poor ones.

Why speed matters for swing and spin

Speed decides which way a ball can swing. In the wind-tunnel tests R. D. Mehta reviewed in 2000, the sideways force on the ball was greatest at about 30 m/s (108 km/h), with the seam angled at 20° and about 11 revolutions a second of backspin, and it fell away quickly at higher speeds. A new four-piece ball swung the other way, reverse swing, above about 80 mph (129 km/h), and a ball with an estimated 100 overs of wear did so from about 65 mph (105 km/h) (R. D. Mehta, 2000). The detail is in swing and seam bowling.

Spinners bowl far slower and rely on revolutions: 23 elite English finger spinners put about 24–36 revolutions a second on the ball at roughly 64–84 km/h (Sanders, Felton and King, 2018). Speed still separates levels. Elite off-spinners bowled the off-break both faster and with more spin than a high-performance group, at 75.1 against 67.1 km/h and 26.7 against 22.2 revolutions a second (Chin and colleagues, 2009). Grips and the main deliveries are in spin bowling types and grips.

Release speed, average speed and why the numbers differ

Speeds on television are release speeds. A radar gun reads the ball at or just after release, when it is fastest, and camera systems use the start of the flight too. Explaining a faulty reading in IPL 2013, Hawk-Eye said its four tracking cameras record about 72 frames of a delivery on average, and that only the first two, the earliest before friction has slowed the ball, give the speed.

Radar has its own errors. The radar gun in one 2024 study was accurate to ±3%, which the authors put at about ±1 m/s, roughly ±3.5 km/h, at the speeds they recorded. A gun reads only the part of the ball’s speed along its own line of sight: Cross works out that a 100 mph ball travelling 5° off the gun’s line reads 99.6 mph, and that the ball slows by about 0.6 mph in its first metre, and he suggests quoting every recorded speed as plus or minus 1 mph, or whatever the margin of error is.

A phone frame count measures something else: the ball’s average speed over the distance you count, slowing and bounce included, so it reads lower than a radar or broadcast figure for the same ball. Compare a frame count only with other frame counts measured the same way.

How to measure ball speed

Without a radar, film the delivery side-on in slow motion with the stumps in view and count the frames from release to the batter’s stumps: how to check bowling speed on your phone explains the set-up, and the free bowling speed calculator does the arithmetic with an error band. Apps that time the ball for you, from manual frame marking to automatic tracking, are compared in our guide to ball speed meter apps.

Stance Cricket, our web app, finds the ball and the stumps in each frame of an uploaded phone clip and takes its scale from the stumps, whose size Law 8 fixes (71.12 cm tall, 22.86 cm wide), so no pitch length has to be assumed. It returns the speed and the line and length the ball pitched on. It is in closed beta; you can join the waitlist.

The fastest balls

Guinness World Records recognises Shoaib Akhtar’s 161.3 km/h (100.2 mph) for Pakistan against England in 2003 as the fastest delivery, and Mitchell Starc’s 160.4 km/h against New Zealand in 2015 as the fastest in a Test match. The full list, the IPL’s quickest balls and the speed-gun readings that were never real are in the fastest balls in cricket.