Walk into any ground in India on a Sunday morning and you will see the same scene repeated a few hundred thousand times: a coach standing behind the nets, watching a young player bat or bowl, and forming a judgment in real time. That judgment–built on years of having seen thousands of players, hundreds of techniques, every kind of failure and breakthrough–is one of the most valuable assets in Indian cricket. No piece of software replicates it. But even the best-trained eye is still working from memory. And in a sport at India’s scale, memory alone is being asked to do a lot of heavy lifting.
India’s grassroots cricket ecosystem is enormous. In 2025 alone, over 1.23 crore players were recorded as active across the country, each having played at least one match that year, with nearly 48.7 lakh matches scored and tracked ball by ball. That is not a hobby. That is national infrastructure. A coach watching this much talent, across these many sessions, simply cannot retain every detail of every player’s technique over a season -not because they aren’t skilled, but because no human memory is built to hold that much information with precision. That’s not a coaching gap. It’s a bandwidth gap.
Formal coaching education in India, through structures like the National Cricket Academy, already trains coaches in biomechanics, skill periodisation, and talent identification frameworks. The expertise exists. What’s missing further down the pyramid isn’t skill, it’s support. A coach working with 50 players across a season is making the same calibre of judgment a top academy coach makes, just without footage to revisit, without a record of how a player looked three months ago, and without an easy way to compare one player’s action against thousands of others. The eye-test dominates not because coaches lack rigour, but because the tools to back up that rigour haven’t reached most of them yet.
Two experienced coaches watching the same young bowler can reach different conclusions about the same action–not because either is wrong, but because each is comparing the player to a different personal archive of players they’ve coached over the years. That’s the nature of expertise built on individual experience: It’s deep, but it’s personal. There’s currently no easy way for one coach’s years of pattern recognition to be checked against, or shared with, another’s. Giving coaches a common, measurable reference point doesn’t override their judgment–it gives every coach access to a far larger bank of comparison than any one career could build alone.
There’s also a structural gap worth naming: the difference between coaching a player and reviewing a player’s performance. Coaching happens in the moment, on the ground, often under time pressure. Performance review, the kind that should follow a season, a tournament, or even a single net session, rarely happens with the same depth. Without recorded, comparable data, review tends to default back to memory and impression, the same inputs that shaped the original coaching decision. The loop never breaks.
This is also, anecdotally, why young players in India so often carry the same technical flaw for years. A flaw that isn’t measured isn’t easy to track. A coach may flag it once, the player may feel like they’ve fixed it, and without footage or data to compare against, both move on -until the same error resurfaces in a bigger match, against better bowling, with higher stakes.
None of this requires abandoning the coach’s eye, it requires giving it company. When training and match performance can be captured, measured, and compared consistently across sessions, across players, across regions, coaching stops being a single person’s judgment call and starts becoming a shared, reviewable record. That shift matters most at exactly the points where Indian cricket loses talent today: In training feedback that doesn’t stick, in selection decisions made on incomplete information, and in regional players who never get assessed against a common yardstick.
The cricket academy industry globally is already moving in this direction, with rising investment in analytics-supported coaching and structured talent identification systems as part of its next growth phase. India, with by far the largest base of playing talent in the world, has the most to gain from making this shift -and arguably the most to lose by being late to it.
The eye-test got Indian cricket this far. The data-test is what takes it further.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Amit Sharma, founder, Advanced Impactor.
