A recent story in the Sydney Morning Herald referred to a new development in cricket bats, with about a quarter of the back of it flattened and rolled so that a batsman, especially in Twenty-20 cricket, could use both sides of it as a switch hitter.
If the development is a success, it will represent the first new conceptual breakthrough in the art of bat-making for over 100 years.
The fact is that bats used by, say, Victor Trumper, are not greatly different than those used by modern players. Both are made of English willow.
Dennis Lillee tried to introduce an aluminium bat, but this was outlawed.
The width of the bats are about the same. The modern bat generally is much heavier and has thicker edges. But these are marginal differences.
The two-sided bat, though, is an interesting concept.
Peter Roebuck tells the story of his days teaching cricket at Cranbrook to the likes of Jamie Packer. A German teacher at the school, who was a German and had no idea about cricket, encouraged the players in the team he had to coach to use the back of the bat at all times to ensure that no one could predict where the ball would go after it hit the sloped back of the bat.
There have been experiments with taking the sloped back off bats and spreading the thickness of the wood to other areas of the bat, thereby creating a larger sweet spot for hitters.
When I was being coached, along with a number of other likely youngsters, in the late 1950s in Wellington by an old English pro by the name of Charlie Barnett (a former Test player), he ruined my season and that of a number of the other boys by flogging off bats to us, at a great price, that had no shoulders on them.
Later, Lance Cairns used a similar bat with some success.
But the shoulder-less bat never really caught on.
Sachin Tendulkar, apparently, uses a specially made bat with a longer blade than usual, and very wide edges and an extremely short handle. The bat is significantly heavier than the bat used by Don Bradman but, as I’ve mentioned, it is not significantly different to the Bradman model made by Sykes.
One other thought about bats.
It is only in the last 30 years or so that young players and those not playing in the first class arena had their own bats. You would get your bat from the team’s kit, even first grade players.
One of the incentives for being an opening batsman was that you had the chance to grab one of the better bats in the bag.
Now even kids starting out have their own bat. Or bats.
It’s only a matter of time before there is a craze for the two-faced bat, especially among youngsters. The good players will be able to use the bat effectively, one would imagine.
And the ordinary players will remain ordinary players, no matter how good their bat is.
The sad truth about cricket is that, at the end of the day, it is the player who hits, snicks or misses the ball, not the bat.
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