I guess I'm having a bit of a mid-life crisis and re-living my youth. The opportunity to get back to playing cricket has now come (after 15+ years away from the game) so I thought I'd take the opportunity to buy a bat or 2 or 3 ....... or 4 ..........
As an 9yr old budding cricketer back in the early 1980's I always loved Slazenger bats. Most kids had Gray Nicholls bats but I personally never liked them. My first bat - Size 6 was a full white polyarmoured 'Slazenger Colt' (I think that's what it was called.) which cost around $60NZD brand new. That was back when batsmen actually liked to get cherries all over their bats and with the bat being white it cherried up easily, providing of course I could hit the ball!
Then back 1983/84 when NZ toured England then a year later England toured NZ (were I grew up) I saw Allan Lamb smashing our bowling attack all over the park with his V12. From then on the V12 was the bat for me! A lot of our local senior cricketers used them and our town sports shop always had them in stock. Unfortunately $190.00 was a lot of money back then and was way out of my parents and my price range so I never got one. Years later and when I began working things changed and I was able to buy one. I had some great innings and scored a lot of runs using it. I guess a lot of it was mental but what ever it was it worked for me.
Then travel, marriage and children took over and cricket was given away along with all my gear...........until now, courtesy of Ebay and the internet........
It's funny, comparing the new V6 & V12 up against the older bats, the V12 second from the right still has the best middle out of all of them & that bats' gotta be at nearly 30yrs old!