- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
Judging by the Marylebone Cricket Club’s world cricket committee’s latest recommendations you could be forgiven if you thought all of the game’s ills were found in the size of the bats being used nowadays.
Before you do a double take, you read that correctly.
The committee, which proposes changes to the sport’s rules, believes batting has become a trifle too easy because of the sizeable clefts which do the rounds.
As such, they think a restriction on the size of the edges (35-40mm) and depth of the blade (60-65mm) would allow a better balance between bat and ball to be struck thus, if all follows as it should do, benefiting the game as a whole.
In purely theoretical terms this seems like a perfectly good idea. Stop a particular element from getting out of control in order to maintain the integrity of the sport which does, whether you like it or not, heavily favour those doing the batting.
In the words of the MCC:
“The overwhelming (but not unanimous) view of the committee was that it has become too easy for batsmen to clear the boundary in all forms of cricket, even with mistimed shots. Furthermore, it was felt that there is a clear safety concern for close fielders, bowlers and umpires, while the recreational game is also suffering, as balls are flying into nearby residential properties with increasing frequency, thus threatening the existence of some smaller cricket clubs.”
So there you go. Too many sixes, physical danger to other participants and the chance of a cricket ball being hit into someone’s garden (that final point in the MCC statement is nonsense if ever I’ve heard it).
Cricket has myriad challenges to deal with if it is to develop and prosper in the years to come but the size of the bats being used isn’t one of them.
What about the ridiculously crowded international calendar, the ever-present threat of matchfixing, dwindling Test match crowds, ineffectual governance and financial inequality?
There are more I’m sure but all of those may be a good place to start rather than worrying about how big Chris Gayle or David Warner’s respective weapon of choice is.
In simple terms, a ball is hit no harder by Warner than it was by Robin Smith 15 years ago or Viv Richards 10 years before that and they didn’t use bats like those shown off in the modern age.
How a bat is manufactured has definitely changed with the distribution of weight, the way it’s pressed and the density of the wood enabling an identical weight but a significantly larger profile to be attained. That leads to a sweet spot that covers a greater percentage of the blade which would be of advantage to any batsman, however talented they may be.
A bat could have edges half the width and a spine half the depth and it wouldn’t make any real difference if similar manufacturing techniques are used. I would take an educated guess that should bat sizes be limited in the near future, it won’t make any difference whatsoever to the proliferation of six-hitting that is considered to be such a dangerous factor.
Batmakers will find a way of optimising the performance of their products, as they always do, and the results will be the same.
What has certainly been missed by those sitting around the table are other elements which have caused this matter to ever be debated.
Twenty20 cricket has transformed batsmanship to a revolutionary degree across all formats and there won’t be any going back. The necessity to hit boundaries in such a shortened game has bled through to the longer contests in the latest of cricket’s evolutionary traits.
Add to the melting pot the ridiculously short boundaries used in a lot of cricket – watch the Lord’s Test this week and take note of where the rope is – and it really is no wonder they are cleared more often. Boundaries of 60 yards would barely contain 15 year-olds, let alone professional athletes.
And on the matter of athleticism, the cricketer of 2016 is a better equipped physical specimen than many of his predecessors which has to have an effect along with a more gung-ho mentality.
And that, pretty much, is that. If the size of bats alone is responsible for untold damage to the game’s fabric then do something about it by all means but there are other forces at play which need to be given due consideration.
Those making the decisions are struggling to see the wood for the trees and the pun is very much intended.