Can a phone measure your bowling speed?

The playing conditions fix the distances. The pitch is 22 yards (20.12 m) long between the two bowling creases, where the stumps stand, and each popping crease is 4 feet (1.22 m) in front of its bowling crease. So the two popping creases are 17.68 m apart. Time the ball between them and you have a speed.

• Film in slow motion, at 120 frames per second or higher, from side-on at about the middle of the pitch.
• Stand far enough back to keep both popping creases in the same fixed frame.
• Step through the clip frame by frame and note the frame where the ball leaves the hand and the frame where it reaches the batter’s popping crease.
• Speed in km/h is 63.65 × the frame rate ÷ the number of frames between them. At 120 frames per second, 59 frames is about 129 km/h.

You cannot see the exact moment of release or arrival, only the frames either side of it, so each end can be out by up to one frame. For a ball bowled at 130 km/h, that leaves this range of possible answers:

At an ordinary 30 frames per second the answer can be out by 15 to 20 km/h either way, which is more than the difference between most club bowlers. At 240 it narrows to about 2 km/h. The faster the ball, the wider the range at any frame rate.

A radar gun measures the ball close to its peak speed, around release. A phone timing is an average over the whole distance, and the ball slows along the way, through the air and again when it bounces. A ball that pitches before the batter’s crease spends part of the timed distance at its slower, after-bounce speed.

The distance is also an assumption. The ball is released somewhere near the bowler’s popping crease rather than exactly on it, and it travels a slightly longer path than the straight line between the creases.

So a phone figure should not be compared with a speed-gun figure, a broadcast speed or another bowler’s reading. Compare it only with your own phone timings, filmed the same way.

Radar guns have their own error. In a comparison with motion capture, a radar gun in line with the ball read peak speed slightly high, by about 1.7 m/s (about 6 km/h) on average, and stayed consistent up to roughly 20° off the ball’s line.

Some apps track the ball through a phone video and do the timing for you. One has been tested against a radar gun: across 1,081 deliveries filmed in training, Fulltrack AI and the radar agreed well for pace bowling (an intraclass correlation of 0.87 to 0.90), less well for spin, and the app read higher than the radar on average, by about 0.7 m/s (about 2.7 km/h) for pace. Its readings for individual balls differed from the radar’s by more than the 3% the researchers set as acceptable. The authors describe it as a reliable field method that should be used with caution. Like a phone timing, an app reading is most useful against your own earlier readings from the same app.

With the same camera position, frame rate and length of delivery each time, a phone timing can show whether you are trending faster or slower over weeks. That is often the question that matters in training. For an absolute number, or a precise comparison between bowlers, use a radar gun.

FastBowlingLab does not measure ball speed. It measures the movement behind your pace from the same kind of slow-motion clip, such as front-leg brace, trunk position and the bowling arm. If you do have a speed-gun reading, log it with your bowling spell in the Train tab and FastBowlingLab keeps your fastest ball as a personal best.

1. International Cricket Council. Men’s Test Match Playing Conditions, Clause 6: The pitch. Official playing conditions
2. International Cricket Council. Men’s Test Match Playing Conditions, Clause 7: The creases. Official playing conditions
3. Smith & Burke (2024). Influence of angular position on radar gun peak cricket ball speed measurements. 10.1080/14763141.2021.1887343
4. Shorter, Tissera, Huynh & Benson (2025). A comparison of Fulltrack AI application as an alternative to radar gun measured cricket ball delivery speed. 10.1177/17479541241284714