The pinnacle of world cricket--research that supports the game.

Abstract

For those of our readers who follow and understand the game of cricket, you will no doubt agree that the ICC Cricket World Cup to be held in Australia and New Zealand in early 2015 is the pinnacle of world cricket. As was pointed out in an earlier editorial, 1 those who do not come from the small number of countries who follow cricket, will not understand what all the fuss is about. This World Cup that I am referring to is the one-day version of the game where players from one team awkwardly throw a hard leather ball at the opposition players (don’t worry, only one ball and one player at a time). The player with a wooden bat then attempts to hit the ball as long as they can in order to run a certain distance before the ball is recovered by the fielding team. Any clearer yet? Perhaps for those of you who I have now confused even further should watch out for the major media coverage that will follow the Cricket World Cup and see for yourself what all the fuss is about. Given the interest in this sport in some of the countries who closely follow our journal I thought it was appropriate to focus this editorial on the research that supports cricket. I have selected two papers that focus on cricket to include in this issue. In the first of these papers Orchard and colleagues from Australia examined the risk of injury in cricket fast bowlers within the context of the match workloads over the period prior to injury taking place. They found that there were no increases in subsequent injury risk for high workloads for periods of 12–26 days, although exceeding 100 overs (i.e., 600 match balls bowled) in 17 days or less was associated with higher injury rates. Given that Australia and South Africa are fierce rivals in cricket it would be remiss of me not to include a paper coming out of South Africa. Olivier and colleagues (from South Africa) examined the difference in lumbo-pelvic movement control, and static and dynamic balance, at the start and end of a cricket season to identify any differences between fast bowlers who sustained an injury versus those who did not. They identified that lumbo-pelvic movement control could not discriminate between injured and non-injured participants, but that single leg balance at the start of the season was better in players who did not sustain an injury during the season. Given the theme of this editorial and the Cricket World Cup, I highlight below a range of other cricket research we have published in the last few years for your interest. This research has covered broad areas including biomechanics, psychology, injury risk, muscle asymmetry, anatomy, and motor skill acquisition. For