How Stance Cricket differs from other cricket apps

What Stance does: three analyses from phone video

Stance is a cricket video analysis web app for players and coaches, built in India by CitroSpace. You film with your phone’s own camera, upload the clip in your browser and get three separate analyses back. They are kept separate on purpose, because each answers a different question.

Batting analysis looks at the body through the shot: how the base is set, how the trunk rotates, where the head stays at contact, and whether the body segments fire in a sensible order or one joint is compensating for the rest.

Ball analysis gives the delivery’s speed, the line and length it pitched on, and any seam or swing movement in flight. Stance finds the ball and the stumps in every frame and calibrates the pitch from the stumps, which Law 8 of the Laws of Cricket fixes at 71.12 cm tall and 22.86 cm wide, so no radar or sensor is involved.

Run-up analysis covers the approach and the delivery stride, where many bowling problems start even when they show up at release.

For bowlers, Stance also measures elbow angle through the release window. It is information, not an official ruling; our guide to elbow extension explains what the release window is.

A session is two or more marked deliveries or shots analysed together, because one ball is an anecdote, and sessions stack over time so that trends show. Each session produces a STANCE Report and a shareable story card. Our filming guide shows the set-up for each clip.

What Stance is built around

Five choices shape Stance. None of them makes it the right tool for every job, but together they describe what it is for.

The body as well as the ball. Two of the three analyses, and the elbow reading, are about how the player moved: the base and trunk through a shot, the approach and delivery stride, the bowling arm through release. The ball’s speed, line and length sit alongside them, so what the ball did can be read next to how the body produced it.

One phone and no hardware. There is no sensor on the bat or the body, no radar gun and no markers taped to your joints. The stumps, a regulated size, are the ruler in every frame.

Nothing to install. Stance is a web app that runs in your browser.

One standard for a whole squad. A coach or academy creates an organisation and invites players, and every player’s sessions roll up into one squad grid, with notes, session planning, per-player dashboards and improvement tracking. Because every player is measured the same way, comparing them means something, and the session history outlives any change of staff. Cricket video analysis software for coaches explains why that matters.

The method and its limits are published. We explain how Stance measures, and where one camera falls short, in our guides, rather than quote an accuracy figure we have not measured in your conditions.

Other kinds of cricket tool, by type

We describe other tools here by type, not by product, and in general terms; how to choose a cricket analysis app covers each type in more detail. Individual products vary, so check what any particular one says it measures.

Ball-tracking apps are built around the ball. They follow it across the frames to log speed, line, length and movement, often for every delivery of a net session or a match, and many cut the clips for you; some add a few body measures as well. If you want every ball logged, this is the type built for it. If body mechanics matter to you too, check which body measures a ball-tracking app reports before you choose.

Bowling-speed apps focus on one number. Some time the ball from frames or taps you mark; others track it automatically. If you time a ball yourself or use a frame-timing app, two things set the precision. The first is frame rate: at 30 fps one frame of doubt is worth about ±6% on a 120 km/h ball, and at 240 fps under ±1%. The second is distance: the stumps are 20.12 m apart, but the ball leaves the hand in front of the bowler’s stumps and travels about 18.5 m to the batter’s, so check whether yours assumes 20.12 m, which reads about 9% fast. Checking bowling speed on your phone works through the sums.

Handheld radar guns measure speed directly, from a signal reflected off the ball, so there is no distance to assume and no frame to count. They are the reference instrument for release speed, but they have to be lined up with the ball’s path and they have a tolerance: one research team quotes ±3% for the radar gun it used, about ±3.6 km/h at the 119 km/h average speed that study recorded. Radar reads the ball at release, when it is fastest, so a speed worked out over the ball’s whole path will read lower.

Bat sensors fit on the bat and usually record bat speed, bat angles and swing on every shot, with no camera to set up.

Manual video-analysis software lets you slow footage down, draw on frames and measure angles, distances and times by hand. Some of it costs nothing and it is flexible, but you do most of the measuring yourself.

Academy and club management apps are usually built around running the academy: scheduling, attendance, drills, messages to parents and, in some, video clips and analysis.

Where Stance sits among them: it overlaps with ball-tracking apps on speed, line and length, with bowling-speed apps on speed, and with academy apps on managing a squad. Its emphasis is different. Most of what it measures is the body that bowled or faced the ball, it works on clips you upload (two or more deliveries or shots at a time) rather than logging every ball of a match, and its coach side is built around one measurement standard for every player.

When another type of tool fits better

Stance is not the right choice for every job, and it is in closed beta, so if you need something today another tool may be the practical answer anyway.

If you want every ball of a net session or a match logged, with pitch maps and clips cut for you, a ball-tracking app is built for that. If you need a reference release speed, to test a squad or check another figure, use a radar gun lined up with the ball’s path and allow for its tolerance.

If all you need is an occasional speed figure, a frame count from your own slow-motion clip may be enough; our free bowling speed calculator does the arithmetic and shows the ±1-frame error band.

If you bat and want swing data on every shot without setting up a camera, a bat sensor does that. If you are happy to measure by hand, manual video-analysis software lets you check one angle frame by frame. If what you mainly need is fees, attendance and scheduling, a management app is built for that.

Using Stance alongside another tool

Because Stance is built around the body and many other tools around the ball, the bat or the squad, using two is often more useful than choosing one. One routine: let a ball-tracking app log the whole net session, and film the deliveries you want to examine for Stance, such as a new run-up or a ball that keeps drifting down leg.

Then read the two together. A ball-tracking log can show that the length drifted or the pace dropped late in a spell; Stance can show whether the run-up or the delivery stride changed at the same point.

Speed figures from two tools will rarely match exactly, because they measure from different positions and in different ways. Pick one as your reference for speed and use the other for what it measures that the first does not. If the two want the phone in different places, use two phones or film separate sets, and keep each set-up the same from week to week.

What Stance is today

Stance is in closed beta, and access is by waitlist, which you can join here. It is a web app, so there is nothing to install: you film with your phone’s own camera and upload the clip.

The limits, stated plainly

Stance works from one camera, and one camera sees a flat projection of a three-dimensional movement. Movement across the frame measures well; movement towards or away from the lens measures least well, because that is the direction in which the image changes least. That is why the camera position for each clip matters, and why our filming guide sets one out for each.

When one limb hides another, the joint underneath is inferred rather than seen, and an inferred position is less reliable than a seen one. Absolute angles are also harder to recover than change, so trends across sessions filmed the same way are more trustworthy than any single reading. Cricket biomechanics from video explains both.

Stance works on clips you upload, two or more deliveries or shots per session, so it is not built to log every ball of a match. The elbow reading is information, not an official ruling. We publish the method and these limits rather than quote an accuracy figure we have not measured in your conditions, and we have not tested the accuracy of any other tool for this page.

Disclosure: we make Stance

Stance Cricket is our product. This page is written by Rishi Gupta and Pradaksh Prasun, who founded CitroSpace, the company that makes it. It describes other kinds of cricket tool in general terms, not any particular product, so check what a specific tool says about itself before you choose. Tell us if anything here is out of date.