Straight from my blog...
As unlikely as it may seem that Shakespeare was thinking of cricket when he wrote Iago's immortal words "It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.", the phrase is certainly apt here. Sometimes you hear something that stops you in your tracks and makes you wonder if you imagined it happened. Whilst I'd hoped this view was not prevalent in cricket, I am realistic enough to know it was only hope.
For whatever reason cricket bats have become bigger in the last decade. Whether this can be put down to pressing techniques, drying, changes in the willow tree, optical illusions or black magic, I can't be sure. But I do know it's happened. If this is Fashion or Progress can be debated but what I heard highlighted something far more concerning than bat size.
It made me pose to myself such questions as How have we come to this? Where did we go wrong? Was it something I said? What the hell is going on?
The phrase was...
"His bat is bigger than mine"
That's right, take the stumps out the ground, pack your bags and lock the clubhouse. We've reached the end of the line. The green eyed monster is no longer twelfth man, he's in the team and we can't drop him. What is the purpose of the pursuit of size? Perhaps it's the pursuit of confidence, I can fully understand the link between confidence in a bat and size but that doesn't mean the perception is based on any hard evidence. Prove to me beyond a doubt that a bigger bat is consistently a better bat. We've seem the explosion of bigger bats on the market with most manufacturers offering a cricket bat's inside leg measurement as some marketing madness.
The "flat face" pressing was a laughable example of this. The sales pitch was that it helped you direct your shots better as the ball didn't roll off the face, in reality it was simply there to add a couple of mm's to the edge. However you only had to round those edges over when you knocked the bat in.
I know I sound like a broken record, constantly harping on about perception. But at every stage of the process we find our choices being influenced by factors which often have little or even no bearing on a cricket bat. We show off our new cricket bats to our friends, team mates, to those we don't even know and offer details that after consideration can't really properly communicate the quality of cricket bat. After all the only way to know if a cricket bat is truly any good is to use it.
Perhaps we have started to use spine height, edge size and other physical qualities as a way of providing ourselves with some objective tools to assess a cricket bat before we part with our hard earned money. As is outlined in this article, we can also easily compare our bat with another. Having said this we know that each piece of wood is unique and we have the unenviable task of comparing something subjective with objective tools.
Why should we care if someone has a bigger bat than us, shouldn't we be in pursuit of a bat that performs? The argument of increased size = increased confidence is understandable but seeing the ball rocket to the boundary is surely the greatest confidence boost for any batsmen.
A big bat looks like it'll hit the ball hard but that doesn't mean it will. Power and volume are no doubt related but not to the extent to which people attribute such great importance. Mass is hiding in the background, ever present but often overlooked. If we're getting bigger bats for similar weights then something has changed. Units of mass haven't changed, a pound is still a pound. Big edges haven't appeared out of thin air, the wood must have come from another place on the bat.
Concaving?
Concaving is a tool I use to balance a bat, to allow me to leave the most mass in the swell. Simple as that. If you're focused on finding the biggest bat rather than the best bat then you may as well be comparing your manhood in the shower.
12 or 15mm edges on a 2lbs 5oz Gray Nicolls Powerspot.
Look at those MONSTER Edges, I need to sit down.
I'll leave you with this...
Ask yourself if some of the wood in those 40mm edges could be put to use more efficiently elsewhere?
Now this one is only my perception, opinion and view on this subject. It's not right nor is it wrong.
If you like it, you can take it, if you don't, send it right back.
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Topic: Beach's Bat Making (Read 28785 times)