Dr Paul Felton is a sports biomechanist at Nottingham Trent University (PhD Loughborough, funded by the England & Wales Cricket Board). He sits on the ICC Suspect Bowling Actions Panel (since 2014), works with the ECB Coach Association as a coach developer (since 2021), and runs The Cricket Biomechanist. He is one of the most prominent applied researchers in cricket biomechanics.
This catalogue covers his complete published output — 25 journal articles, 27 conference papers, 6 theses he authored or co-supervised, plus 2 items found outside his own publication list. Every cricket item gets a full breakdown of theme, findings, and what a coach should look for on video.
How to use this
| If you are… | Start here |
|---|---|
| A fast bowling coach worried about backs | The Coach’s Playbook, then Fast Bowling Injury & Lumbar Spine |
| A fast bowling coach chasing pace | The Coach’s Playbook, then Fast Bowling Technique & Context |
| Coaching women | Fast Bowling Technique & Context — see the “Coaching female cricketers” cues |
| Coaching spin | Spin Bowling & Batting |
| Coaching batting / power hitting | Practitioner & Reference Outputs — written for coaches |
| Working on length control | Fast Bowling Variations & Loading |
| Building or trusting a video analysis system | Methods & Modelling |
| Wondering what’s disputed | Contradictions |
Three documents sit above the folders:
- The Coach’s Playbook — every video-checkable cue in the corpus, organised by camera angle and by the frame you scrub to. This is the practical output.
- Contradictions — where the research disagrees with itself, with earlier literature, or with coaching orthodoxy. Read before acting on any single paper.
The five things worth knowing before you read anything else
1. The mixed action does not predict back injury. Fifty elite bowlers, prospective, MRI-confirmed. Shoulder counter-rotation was 43 ± 14° in bowlers who subsequently fractured versus 40 ± 20° in those who didn’t — not significant, and the injured group averaged above the famous 30° threshold. What does predict injury is a collapsed back leg at back foot contact (rear hip 146° vs 156°) and lumbopelvic extension at front foot contact; together they classify 88% of bowlers. The paper tells coach education to move on. Thirty years of orthodoxy, contradicted.
2. Optimal technique is individual — but less individual than he first argued. Felton’s founding claim was that each bowler has their own optimum, so blanket technical models are wrong. His own 2023 work then found genuine commonalities across elite bowlers. What survives is subtler and more useful: the direction of the target is shared; how far a given bowler can move toward it is individual.
3. None of the simulation work has been tested in the field. Every ball-speed figure in the simulation cluster is a computer prediction. The promised follow-up — coach the bowler, re-measure, report back — was proposed in 2017 and has never been published. Ask “was this measured or simulated?” of every number, and the answer for that cluster is always simulated.
4. Video can be trusted for angles and timing. Not for forces. Controlled comparison: trunk orientation error ~0.9°, ball speed error 1.7–3.8%, but ground reaction force error 11–18%. So: count frames and measure joint angles with confidence; do not infer loading from footage. And note that fast bowling is the worst case for 2D analysis, because it is a side-on action with real out-of-plane hip and shoulder motion a single camera cannot recover.
5. Men’s findings do not transfer to women. Trunk flexion is a pillar of the male ball-speed model and predicts nothing in women (r = −0.19, p = 0.57). In batting, all 15 male batters extended the lead elbow through the downswing; 8 of 15 female batters flexed it. Coaching the men’s model into the women’s game is not conservative — it is unsupported.
How much to trust a given claim
A confidence ladder, applied across the catalogue:
| Confidence | What | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| High | Joint angles and orientations from motion capture | Trunk angle ~0.9° error; the injury group means in the lumbar-spine cluster |
| High | Ball/bat speeds, timings, frame counts | Release speeds; BFC→FFC 192 ms vs FFC→BR 103 ms |
| Medium | Between-player correlations in decent samples | Length control η² = 0.78 (n = 21); the 88% injury model (n = 50) |
| Medium-low | Simulated effects of a technique change | Everything in the simulation cluster |
| Low-medium | Ground reaction forces from models | 11–18% error |
| Low | Internal tissue loading | Not measured anywhere; inferred |
| Indicative only | “Optimal technique” | n = 1 in the founding work; never field-validated |
Two caveats attach to almost everything here. Nearly all of it is correlational — bowlers who had X also had Y; almost no one was coached to change X and re-measured. And nearly all of it is male, elite, and English pathway — the injury work compares 39 injured to 11 uninjured bowlers, mean age 18.9.