Three centimetres, three milliseconds

For anyone facing 90mph, "If you don't see it out of the hand, you're in deep s**t," says Ian Chappell, the former Australia captain renowned as a fine player of pace. "You're not going to pick it up later."

In the 0.4 seconds that a batter has between a ball being bowled and it reaching them, they have to make myriad decisions: where the ball will pitch; how it will bounce; whether it will swing in the air before pitching; and whether it will seam off the pitch after it lands. Then, batters either play their shot, leave the ball or, if the delivery is speared towards their body, sway out of the way. To make effective contact with the ball, the margin of error is infinitesimal: batters must judge the ball's position to within three centimetres and the time it reaches them to within three milliseconds.

Batters don't even get the full 0.4 seconds to decide what shot to play. David Mann, an associate professor at the University of Amsterdam who has conducted extensive research with Australian Test players, has found that batters must commit to their shot 0.15 seconds before the ball reaches them. For the last one-third of the ball's journey, batters are effectively blind: this is why a ball that moves late or bounces unpredictably is so devastating. Against the quickest bowlers, Chappell recalls, "You never see the ball hit the bat."

There is simply far too much to process in the time after the ball leaves the bowler's hand. As such, batters use cues to get a sense of what delivery they will face. Batters, Mann explained to me, use information "before the ball is even released from the body cues of the bowler" - from their face, shoulder, arm and their instincts - to deduce where the ball is likely to be. Some bowlers will display more effort in the final moments of their run-up when about to deliver a bouncer. Bowlers tend to release the ball slightly earlier when they are about to bowl yorkers, and later when bowling a bouncer.

"You pick it up out of the hand and you get a lot of information about the delivery," Chappell says. "The best bowlers don't give you early warning signs. If somebody gave you an early warning sign, that was a big plus."

After the ball is released, it travels too quickly for batters to follow it all the way onto the bat. Instead, they follow its first movement, identifying information about the ball's line, length, and whether it swings before pitching. Elite batters, Mann has shown, then perform two "saccades", moving their eyes to where the ball is going to be: first to the point when it bounces; second, to the point when they make contact. This is why the best batters are said to have more time: their eyes get into place more quickly than other players, so they look less rushed at the crease.

Shaping up to play a shot, the latest time that any batter can make a minor adjustment - say to the angle of their bat, with it already too late to change what stroke they are playing - is about 100 milliseconds, the equivalent of seven yards before the ball reaches them. The only exception appears to be moving the head; survival instincts allow batters to move their head out of the line of the ball in the final yards as it travels towards them.

The best batters process the cues about what a ball is likely to do faster and more accurately. Then they use their hand-eye coordination to get into position to play their shot. "They're just like clockwork," Mann told me. "They're so well trained and so accurate with their predictions."

Test batters who Mann studied "tracked the ball perfectly with their head, essentially to the point where their nose would be pointing at the ball the whole way. We've got this funny thing in cricket, where we say, 'Watch the ball and keep your head still.' Most of the tracking is done with the head. The eyes do very little work."

Of all Test batters since 2006, when CricViz's ball-tracking began, AB de Villiers has the best record against deliveries of 87mph or faster, averaging over 60. De Villiers defied Mitchell Johnson at his most menacing, averaging 56.83 in the three-Test series against Australia in 2014. "That was an opportunity to show people and my team-mates that I'm prepared to fight it out," de Villiers recalls. "It's more a personality trait than anything else.'

Facing such speeds, "It all happened in slow motion," de Villiers explains. "My biggest strength was to be exceptionally still at the crease at the point of delivery. As the ball was about to leave his hand, that's where things started for me. I was always dead still.

"It's just a matter of being still and seeing that first metre after the ball is released from the hand. From then on, all the information would flow in.

"The faster the bowlers, the more important that gets, because you can't afford to miss out on that first metre when the ball comes to you. When you're moving around, you miss that first yard - that's when you get into trouble."

Contrary to popular belief, elite batters' reaction times are not unusually quick; their eyesight also isn't exceptional. Batters' brilliance lies less in genetics than in how they refine their anticipation - identifying cues to make complex decisions in the blink of an eye.

To face 90mph bowling is to accept the possibility of terrible consequences if you are hit. "I hated facing it but I loved it," says Australia opener Justin Langer, who played from 1993 to 2007. "You knew you're alive. Fast bowling is probably the foundation of great, great Test cricket."

At least since Australia paired Jack Gregory and Ted McDonald together in 1920-21, the physical threat of facing pace bowling has been an indelible part of Test cricket. Remarkably, no one has been killed in a Test when facing a short ball; perhaps the closest was New Zealand tailender Ewen Chatfield, who stopped breathing when he was hit on the temple by a bouncer from England's Peter Lever in 1975. But Test players have been killed in first-class cricket. In 2014, Phillip Hughes was struck on the back of a neck during a Sheffield Shield match; he died of the blow, aged 25.

It was a terrible reminder that helmets have not eliminated the risk of fatalities. Research by Peter Brukner, the former Australia team doctor, and Tom Gara, a historian at the South Australian Museum, has found that blows to the head sustained while playing - and therefore concussions - have risen markedly since the 1990s, especially since the 2010s. This spike since helmets were popularised suggests several potential causes: bowlers are bowling faster; bowlers are more willing to use the bouncer, especially against lower-order players; and batters' techniques have changed for the worse.

"I once got to the halfway stage, but out of the corner of my eye I could see the local hospital," England's Len Hutton said of hooking Keith Miller and Ray Lindwall in the 1950s.

"There are more front-foot players around now than there were in my time," believes Chappell, who played Tests from 1964 to 1980. "A lot of players were back-foot players - in playing back, you give yourself that extra metre to see the ball and play the ball. Being on the back foot, you can get inside the ball - so if you miss the hook shot, the ball misses you. That's how it should be. But if you're hooking off the front foot, how do you get inside the line of the ball? You cannot.

"If you get inside the ball and you know that if you miss it, it is going to miss you, then you're more likely to watch the ball closely onto the bat. To me, that's crucial in hooking - you've got to watch the ball closely. Blokes who are hooking off the front foot when the ball is coming straight at their face - they'll turn their head. I think it's the turning of the head and taking the eye off the ball that sees more players get hit."

After helmets became common in World Series Cricket, and were popularised over the 1980s, the sport has become notably safer, Brukner and Gara have illustrated. In the 1970s in Australia, nine players died while playing cricket at any level; another five died in the 1980s. From 1990, when helmets became common at all levels of the game, until 2016, there were only five recorded deaths across all Australian cricket. In a happy tale of unintended consequences, World Series Cricket can be said to have saved lives.

Hughes's death in 2014 led to two other significant improvements in safety: neck guards were added to helmets; and concussion substitutes were adopted in Tests from 2019, with anyone deemed to have suffered a concussion now automatically replaced. Before, there was no replacement for concussed players, leading players with suspected concussion to bat on - putting them at risk of suffering a second concussion, which is especially dangerous. Langer estimates that he suffered "six or seven" concussions during his career, including from his very first ball on Test debut, against West Indies' Ian Bishop. "I literally got the boxers' knees - when the boxer gets knocked down, they get the jelly legs,' Langer recalls. "They were vicious blows." Today, Langer would have been withdrawn from the game.

If the physical threat of facing pace bowling has become slightly less, in other ways the Test batter's challenge has become more difficult. Whether or not the pace of the very quickest deliveries has increased, it is likely that more bowlers regularly bowl at speeds of around 90mph than ever before. One slight caveat is that, until 1963, no-balls were determined by whether a bowler's back foot landed behind the bowling crease. Bowlers, especially taller ones, could then drag their back foot forward, and deliver the ball with their front foot several inches beyond the popping crease, reducing the distance to the opposing batter. The no-ball law was then changed to mandate that some part of the front foot must be behind the popping crease.

Compared to the 1990s, modern quicks "have to be consistently faster," believes Damien Fleming, a pace bowler for Australia from 1994 to 2001, who became a coach and analyst. "They're fitter, they're stronger - they've got a lot taller as well." Better strength and conditioning means that "the modern fast bowler bowls more balls to the optimum of their speed than a generation or two ago," Fleming says. "They don't drop too much from day one to day five. Whereas 30 years ago, the drop-off on day five would be more significant."

Initially, the speed gun was not always to bowlers' benefit. The speed gun was first used in Australia for the 1998 Boxing Day Test against England. Fleming and Glenn McGrath, Australia's new-ball pair, became preoccupied with the number that the speed gun would show after each delivery. "We kept trying to bowl short and fast," Fleming recalls. "That was certainly the worst I bowled at Test level."

Australia's Brett Lee and Pakistan's Shoaib Akhtar were among the bowlers who strove to break the 100 mph barrier: cricket's equivalent of the four-minute mile. Contrary to what Fleming and McGrath had assumed, bouncers are slower than fuller deliveries: the ball loses pace after it hits the pitch. Indeed, speed guns remain notoriously unreliable; insiders say that they prioritise producing bowling speeds quickly over reliability. But speed guns have contributed to monitoring pace bowlers more rigorously, thereby giving coaches a better sense of which bowlers maintain pace.

Improvements in sports science, strength and conditioning, and the surge of money in cricket has kept players in the Test game who might have been lost in previous generations. Pat Cummins went six years between playing his first and second Test; after suffering a series of stress fractures, his workload was managed assiduously. From his return, in 2017, he became among the world's most robust bowlers.

During his long Test hiatus, Cummins "definitely" thought he wouldn't play another five-day match. While Cummins was frustrated to wait so long until making his comeback, he believes the attention to detail on modern quicks ultimately extended his career. "Because I was patient and forced to take rests, my back's basically perfect," he reflects. "Your bone strength isn't fully developed till you're about 23, 24. So that's why you get more stress fractures [when you're younger]. And obviously, around that, build up some strength, hopefully some better technique. But the main thing is just, your bones are not dense enough or fully mature until you're 23 or 24 - you can do some damage in that time."

Better awareness of fast-bowling mechanics has encouraged bowlers to incorporate methods shown to increase speed. Bowling with a braced front leg is one such way. Another is hyper-extending the arm, in the manner of India's Jasprit Bumrah. This enables him both to generate extra pace - the hyper-extension acts like a recoiling spring - and to release the ball later, at the equivalent of three o'clock, rather than twelve o'clock. In turn, the motion further reduces the amount of time that the ball has to travel to reach the batter.

Excerpted with permission from Test Cricket: A Biography: The Story of Test Cricket 1877 to Today, by Tim Wigmore (Quercus, 2025, £30)