A Conversation with Warren Brennan About Hotspot, RTS and other Technology in Cricket

My guest is Daniel Norcross of BBC's Test Match Special. Daniel came on to exchange notes about Bazball and its effect on the state of play in Test cricket. This podcast is an edited compilation of our conversation. What is Bazball? On Ben Stokes A Theory about Virat Kohli Daniel tweets @norcrosscricket I tweet @cricketingview This conversation was recorded on Wednesday, July 13, 2022

This is an extended conversation about the cricket played during India's Tests in England in the 2021 season. My guests are SIdharth Monga of ESPNCricinfo and Daniel Norcross of BBC's Test Match Special. What lengths would you bowl to Kohli? Daniel tweets @norcrosscricket Sid allegedly does not tweet. I tweet @cricketingview This conversation was recorded on Saturday, September 11, 2021.

In February 2020,  Daisy, Jonathan and Daniel came on the podcast to discuss DRS and VAR. A year later, they are back to reflect on the developments in both during the past year. The conservation is about the anxieties of evidence in VAR & DRS.  How to watch sports in the age of VAR/DRS? How does evidence work? Does the fact the evidence is produced in disciplined fashion (through measurement, and not just observation - (for example: consider the difference between what's available to the TV umpire on outside edges via RTS/UltraEdge/HotSpot, and what's available to the TV umpire on low catches) entail that spectators need to at least understand the difference between these two types of evidence and their possibilities? Is there an appetite for spectators to understand this? And if such an appetite is limited, then does VAR/DRS have a chance in the long run? Daniel could not join us for this episode. He is a friend of the podcast, and he has made both episodes of this particular conversation possible. Our conversation from February 2020 Daniel Norcross is a cricket commentator with the BBC's Test Match Special @norcrosscricket Daisy Christodoulou's newsletter - I Can't Stop Thinking About VAR. She tweets @daisychristo  Jonathan Wilson is a sports writer and reporter for The Guardian. He tweets @jonawils  I tweet @cricketingview This episode was recorded on April 12, 2021.

Warren Brennan is the founder and chief technology officer of BBG Sports where he has developed the Hotspot/RTS system for spotting edges with Allan Plaskett. In this conversation we talked about technology in sports broadcasting, some details of the Hotspot/RTS system, ball tracking, and the future of technology in sport.

Rob Moody is the curator of the robelinda an robelinda2 cricket video channels on youtube. His videos will be viewed one billion times by mid-April. This is a conversation with him about his collection and its past, present and future in the landscape of cricket boards, broadcasters and Google. Rob's video of Jason Gillespie's 201* Rob tweets @robelinda2 This video was recorded on March 3, 2021.

This conversation is about ESPNCricinfo's Control statistic with their senior stats editor S Rajesh. We discuss what the metric tries to measure, what it contributes to understanding the game, and some interesting statistical summaries of the Control measure over 15 years and hundreds of Tests. Read Sidharth Monga's review of Chennai Test featuring the control measure here The episode was recorded on February 12, 2021. Rajesh tweets (infrequently) @rajeshstats

This is an irregular review of an irregular series in irregular times. My guests are Subash Jayaraman, the veteran host of the Couch Talk podcast and Daniel Norcross from the BBC's Test Match Special. We had a conversation about the cricket we anticipate in this series, the players who are likely to feature in it.  Daniel Norcross tweets @norcrosscricket Subash jayaraman tweets @cricketcouch I tweet @cricketingview This podcast was recorded on February 2, 2021.

Jack Shantry is a former left-arm seam bowler who played for Worcestershire. He is currently a National Panel umpire in the UK.  Daniel Norcross is a cricket commentator on BBC Test Match Special. In this conversation we discuss the laws of cricket and umpiring, and how they constitute the game. Daniel talks about the difficulties arising from having to communicate a subtle, complicated, and often arbitrary set of laws to new audiences. Jack speaks from an umpire's perspective about why certain laws are the way they are, which laws bother him (the answer is most interesting) and where the switch-hit and the lbw law might lead cricket. We also discuss whether batsmen should be out LBW after an inside-edge (its not as mad as it sounds). Jack Shantry tweets @JackShantry Daniel Norcross tweets @norcrosscricket I tweet @cricketingview This conversation was recorded on December 16, 2020.

This is my conversation with Abhishek Mukherjee and Arunabha Sengupta about their forthcoming book Sachin and Azhar at Cape Town: Indian and South African Cricket Through the Prism of a Partnership. Our conversation was recorded across three continents and is, in places, subject to the vagaries of inter-continental wireless communications. The book presents a rich picture of the protagonists of that stand (both Indian and South African) and the period they lived in.  This is a book not just about South Africa, but about a different era in Indian and world cricket. Abhishek tweets @ovshake42 Arunabha tweets @senantix I tweet @cricketingview This conversation was recorded on December 5, 2020

This is a conservation with Tim Wigmore about his new book with Mark Williams The Best: How Elite Athletes Are Made.  Tim contributes to The Daily Telegraph, ESPNCricinfo, The New York Times & The Economist. Tim appeared in episode 3 of this podcast to discuss his previous book Cricket 2.0 with Freddie Wilde. Tim Wigmore tweets @timwig The book is The Best: How Elite Athletes Are Made. An edited excerpt from the book titled Under pressure: why athletes choke was published in The Guardian . This interview was recorded on November 10, 2020.