England’s Mike Gatting was famously bamboozled by spin when the Australian bowler Shane Warne dismissed him with the “ball of the century”.
Twenty years on, two Australian brothers have come up with a mind-boggling set of mathematical formulae that could help aspiring bowlers to recreate Warne’s lethal delivery.
The two physicists have published force equations showing how the pitch of a spinning ball is influenced by a head-wind, tail-wind and cross-wind. The findings are conveniently released just before the start of the Ashes series.
Ian Robinson, of the University of Melbourne, one of the authors of the study, admitted that