Don't want to take this thread too far off topic, happy to talk via pm if you fancy Dave, but I can't take SM Pintu seriously. Their branding is awful. My biggest bug bear is their claims about their handle. As you can see below, it's just a ripoff of something called the kookaburra smart bat, which was quickly abandoned by kook after crickets powers that be banned handle innovation, this all happened about ten years ago. Not only that, but the two SM Pintu bats I've seen both appeared to have totally normal handles. One was knackered and had been abandoned so I cut the handle and found nothing to back up the claims in this picture.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/A47gdOdCIAAWzI8.jpgi.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00635/news-graphics-2007-_635119a.jpgThe other thing of course is that it doesn't matter if energy is lost through vibration, or heat, or whatever. It is still energy lost that isn't being transferred through the ball, rendering the whole idea fairly irrelevant.
The picture is from the website of the official SM Pintu distributor in the UK. They are fairly local to us so I've seen a few bats knocking about. Nice enough but didn't blow me away. Coupled with the branding and my knowledge on the handles was enough for us to decline the distributors offer for us to stock them.
Of course, as with many Indian manufacturers. Being the UK distributor is pretty irrelevant. If we wanted them, we would get SM Pintu bats from source, as I believe Arvind has mentioned he is able to.
Back to topic, Kunal is a unique chap, I'm not sure cricket has seen a brand owner like him before. The TON bats we stock around £100 are very nice, so I expected the Spartans to be the same, which they are. The higher end Spartans are really really nice, is any bat worth £400? Especially when not made in the UK? Honestly I am not sure, but large companies with big players on board need to recoup somehow.
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Topic: Kunal Sharma of spartan in owzat cricket todat (Read 4820 times)