AI in BKC's indoor academy: the questions that matter more than Mumbai cricket's 'first' claim

At ten in the morning, an indoor net has a strange hush to it. Outside, the glass towers of Bandra Kurla Complex are already storing heat; inside the Sharad Pawar Indoor Cricket Academy, you judge a batter's rhythm by the sound of the ball's pitch and then the bat's tap, and then a few seconds of quiet while the coach watches a screen instead of the crease.

That quiet is now being given a third witness. The Mumbai Cricket Association, under president Ajinkya Naik, has begun a pilot in AI-assisted coaching at the indoor academy in partnership with Singapore-based firm Level Up Sportslytics. What sparkles brightest in the report is the line that MCA is the first association in the country to adopt AI in coaching.

I have written from beside cricket grounds for seventeen years, and I have learned that whenever an institution says 'first', that sentence tells you less about the thing it has not yet built and more about itself. In this story I found the least thrill in the word 'first' and the most in the reason the experiment has been deliberately placed inside a controlled, weather-proof indoor room. When an institution draws its perimeter that carefully, something honest is happening inside it.

What is said, and what is not

Let me be clear: there is no cricket in this report. No match, no innings, no player, no wicket. What exists is administrative intent — adding AI to daily net sessions at the Sharad Pawar Indoor Cricket Academy, supporting coaches and players, collecting their feedback once the pilot concludes, and only then taking a decision on what comes next. Naik's line is direct: we need to change as per the time.

That is a small sentence, but in administrative language it is less an announcement than a question asked of oneself. In the tradition of state associations, 'we need to change' is never self-generated initiative; it is almost always an acknowledgement of pressure arriving from outside. In my experience, technology has descended through Indian cricket in three steps — first into the national team's room as video analysis, then into IPL franchise data desks, and last into the nets of state associations. MCA is stepping onto the third rung now, and if that step lands, its echo will be heard in the country's domestic coaching model over the next five years.

The real story is not 'first' — it is 'indoor'

Here I may part ways with the line that decorates every press release. Level Up Sportslytics is a foreign, Singapore-based firm, and its arrangement with an Indian cricket institution is cross-border procurement rather than domestic development. That can mean many things, but one of them is plain: India's sports-technology market is not as mature as we assume, because where markets are immature, the goods arrive from abroad first. That is not an indictment of a state association; it is an honest photograph of the whole industry.

The pilot's location deserves the same attention. The BKC indoor net is a theatre with no weather, no pitch variance, no crowd pressure and an artificial surface. The data the AI receives will therefore be exceptionally clean, exceptionally stable and exceptionally polite. That data can tell you a batter's habit of leaving the ball; it cannot tell you how that same batter honours the same habit in the seventeenth over, three wickets down, inside forty thousand voices. Whether this experiment answers the coaching question depends on who counts the conversion between the clean world and the unstable one. Without that sentence, a successful pilot is only successful indoors.

A test of accountability, not of technology

One reporting error I have made myself: in a story about new technology, debating what it will do rather than who will be watching. The technique data generated in a net session — a batter's angle, release point, elbow flexion, workload shape — is a player's most private property. A nineteen-year-old boy is letting it be seen, and in exchange he hopes his name appears on a list someday. The question is: whose data is it? MCA's, the vendor's, or his? And when a Singapore company keeps a record of Indian teenage cricketers' bodies and techniques on its servers, will it be clear where that data sleeps if someone asks?

This is not a question of investigation but of logic — and it is possible MCA already has answers that the report had no room for. I am only noting that two lines of consent on paper alongside a pilot matter more than three lines of headline about the same pilot. Those who have written seventeen years of cricket know this: domestic cricketers are the party with the least voice, even inside an indoor net.

Where the watchman is the only witness

I have another habit, built during the spectator-less IPL seasons: I time not the noise but the gap before the reaction arrives. Three seconds after a wicket. In indoor nets that measurement becomes even cleaner, because there was never a crowd. When AI coaching is discussed for the first time, most of the enthusiasm is spent on what can be seen — coloured graphs, heat maps, a cathedral of pace numbers. But the real effort is betrayed by the silence on the other side, the side the report never reached: has MCA fixed the pilot's criteria for success? Has even one number been declared in advance, against which the whole experiment must stand or fall?

Because any pilot that ends with the sentence 'we received very good feedback from coaches and it lifted the players' morale' has really had a press release as its metric. I am not doubting the institution; I am naming the administrative temperament that appears when an institution outsources the evaluation of technology to its least neutral participant. AI is not replacing a coach; AI is like an external consultant, and in every net there is one coach saying yes or no to it — the real accountability migrates slowly from that coach's shoulders to the screen's, and that drift is what should be measured.

The pressure you cannot see yet, you will

This story is not hot right now. There is a self-interested indifference all around, because no Mumbai star is in it, no IPL auction, no controversy. Perhaps that is its biggest signal. The absence of outrage is proof that our public conversation still runs on controversy rather than on development. For an institution like MCA that is good news — it can move forward in silence. For the reader it is a reminder that the real churn in domestic cricket happens four pages behind the headlines.

But my deepest interest in this matter lies in a tension the report never touched. Mumbai's domestic record is built on an association that teaches the game on its own strength, on its own grounds, through its own coaches, and turns a boy into a cricketer through its own experience. Selection there has always been done 'by eye', and Mumbai cricket's power has always been the fineness of that eye. When a screen's number edges the eye out of the centre, the association must decide which takes priority — the coach's judgement or the dashboard. The answer is not to choose one. The answer is that both can be wrong, and if both can be wrong, who carries responsibility? MCA did not ask that question in its administrative language, and may not ask it for three years. But the day a twenty-year-old Mumbai batter's selection session is disrupted, that question will stand up next to the screen rather than beside the chief selector.

One last thing, which must be written now

If one camera keeps running in every net session at the Sharad Pawar Indoor Cricket Academy in BKC for another three months, much will change slowly — the sequence of a coach's morning work, a player's post-session questions, and the standing of those trainers who still prefer to understand cricket by listening to it first. The real test of this AI pilot is not whether it recommends right or wrong — the test is whether a state association can place its players' most private data inside a frame of public accountability. Whether Mumbai cricket's first major AI step is remembered for its technology or its administration will be decided by whether the paper on the pilot's last day carries only the association's name, or a mention of the players' consent too.

At the very least, the next time a headline says 'first association', I will repeat my old habit — I will first ask who is the second, and then judge by that second one how solid the initiative is. Because what lasted in history did not last on the pride of being first; what lasted knew exactly where it stood.