Tendulkar, Dhoni launch cricket web portal

'Sports Mechanics' cricket monitoring web portal was on Monday launched here in the presence of senior India batsman Sachin Tendulkar, skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni and coach Gary Kirsten.

The portal named "cricketmentor.tv" is an online mentoring platform that uses cutting edge technologies and methodologies for fostering effective interactions between the player, coach and the other members of the sporting community.

The platform offers e-learning capabilities to players, coaches and institutions to effectively govern, manage, analyse, and report development and goal achievement for individual players and the team as a whole.

The function was also attended by other Indian team members Virender Sehwag, Gautam Gambhir, Suresh Raina, Harbhajan Singh, Munaf Patel, Rohit Sharma and Ashish Nehra.

S Ramakrishnan, the head of the Sports Mechanics and videographer for the Indian cricket team since 2001, who welcomed the gathering said, "This technology is the first of its kind in India. We were the first ones to launch video analysis for cricket in the world in 2000."

"Even today 99 per cent of the coaching is done with a naked eye, which has its own limitations. So, this video analysis technology helps the cricketer to know more about the nuances of the game," Ramakrishnan said.

"The on-field coaching can never be replaced as it is very important but technologies like this could be a additional supplement to the coach, who can watch his wards from wherever he is.

"A channel is given by us for every cricketer and he can upload his videos for monitoring his own right and wrongs.

They can be inter-faced with twitter. It is You tube of cricket. It has more features than you tube. However, more awareness is needed to be created on using video analysis in sports in India," he said.

Coach Kirsten was full of praise for this technology.

"It looks awesome. Good. Certainly what I see it looks exciting. Looking forward to it," he said.

Sports Mechanics, the current performance analyst of the Indian cricket team, volleyball team and squash team, is a sports technology company headquartered at Chennai.