Spin, swing, seam, irregular bounce, using the pace of the ball, Hawkeye – cricket is littered with technical terms and, increasingly, with technology. The Pakistani bowlers who, in the 1980s, discovered that under certain circumstances they could get the ball to swing through the air in the opposite sense to the way that all logic suggested (so-called ‘reverse swing’) were actually applying fluid dynamiand the modification of airflow over a surface in a quite brilliant way, although probably ignorant of the hydrodynamical principals involved.