Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, cricket bails that glitter, rackets that sing, these are a few of my favorite things.

And you don’t have to go too far to look for them. They are coming to you. In a deluge.

The current World Cup T20 has bails that light up like a Xmas tree when dislodged and the wickets blink like the rear brake lights of an expensive sedan. Tomorrow you’ll have an audio elaborating where the ball struck and at what speed. Zings Stumps, the Fox Sport/Cricket Australia company that came up with this visual marvel says it is a split second LED concept that over-rides any third umpire concerns about the batsman being in his crease when the bails go red on him. It is better than DRS. And more reliable. And ends those 33 replays of ‘will he, won’t he’ that we, the audience, have to suffer.

But the most sensational technical revolution in sport this week is the Play and Connect racket the French equipment manufacturer Babolat is demonstrating through Raf Nadal. The sensors in the tennis racket feed through the ether into the laptop or Ipad and the player gets feedback on how well he hit the ball. Each shot is analyzed and you know a top spin went right or can check how often you hit the sweet spot in a rally, how strong is the sprongggg effect if you suspect your guts are sagging, more parameters than a flight recorder.

Come tomorrow it will tell you what stroke to play and admonish you if you don’t. That was set up for a lob, Roger, not a cross court.

For just over 1000 AED a racket, you can take your chatty little companion onto the court and communicate right through your game. The selling point: it is like moving tennis from the silent movie era to talkies and 3D.

It beats the Foxkopter coverage of the Big Bash league where an eight propeller chopper camera in the sky gives you angles you could not dream of with the add on of minicams in the batsman’s helmet providing even more unreal ‘drama.’

So, what is next? Soccer balls that insta-record how hard they were hit and the angle of their arc, the impact ratio with the net when a goal is scored, shuttlecocks that make the sound of ruffled feathers, cricket balls that glow when caught and turn green when catches are grassed? Maybe nets that sparkle if touched by a service ball, running shoes that tell you to speed up your long distance pace and keep you ‘informed’ as you thunder along, who knows one day air conditioned clothes and wired boxing gloves that rack up points without the need for umpires.

One day all this techie stuff will overwhelm true sport and data will become the benchmark. It is already happening. You just have to listen to the drivel in the commentaries on the World T20 channels. If Dale Steyn eats Wheaties instead of Bran Flakes he has a 73% percent chance of taking four wickets. But if he puts marmalade on his toast then South Africa will have a 62% chance of winning. If Chris Gayle puts his left leg into his trouser first he has an 80 percent chance of crossing 30 runs but if it’s the other way around the, horror of horrors, it drops to 55%. And if he is not wearing his black cape chances are he will be run out. The amount of useless information being flung like clods of dirt these days is unbelievable.

And we thought Denis Lillee was a bad ‘un when he played with an aluminum bat in 1979 and crushed the cricket ball. Does anyone even remember Mathew Hayden in the 2010 IPL sparking a controversy with a bat called ‘the mongoose,’ that longhandled, short bladed bat especially made for slogging in T20s. That’s small potatoes compared to what is coming our way.

To think there was a time when good commentary meant a few succinct words every now and again to underscore the pleasure of watching the game unfold in a natural way without twenty seven diversions and absurd angles that you’d have to contort yourself like Houdini to achieve if you were at the stadium.