One tries to hit the ball as far as he can, whilst the other tries to bamboozle him with speed, trajectory and variation. Compared to baseball though, there's a lot more that can happen to a cricket ball on its journey from the bowler's hand to the bat. To exert some variation in flight, the ball is usually aimed to bounce somewhere along its route. That means that the batsman has to track an object that starts from a release point about 2.5 meters off the ground, drops to strike the pitch and then can end up entering his shot zone to his left or right and at any point between his toes and head. There's little enough time to decide which shot to play, let alone actually pull it off successfully.
Eye balls That tricky bounce seems to be the key.
Although everybody starts out watching the ball, good players quickly shift their attention to the predicted impact point and then begin to work things out from there. It generally takes just half a second for a fast delivery to reach a batsman. Yet within 200 milliseconds of the ball leaving the bowler's hand, his opponent is already looking elsewhere. Consequently the amateur ends up befuddled by sheer velocity. The findings were made by University of Sussex neuroscientist Professor Michael Land and Dr Peter McLeod, an experimental psychologist at the University of Oxford.