Cricket bats: too heavy!

A short version of this article appeared under the title ‘Need to Prune Thickness of Bats’ in the New Indian Express, 25.10.2011, page 14.

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The ICC has just made a batch of rule changes in cricket, addressing Powerplays, runners, obstruction of the field and suchlike. Bully for them, but there’s one other section of the rules I wish they’d had a look at. I’m talking about the weight and thickness of cricket bats.

I know I’m only pointing out the obvious when I say the tools of the trade have become massive in recent years, but I was reminded of the full import of it recently when I was watching the Champions League T20 semi-finals on TV, as first David Warner and then Chris Gayle acquainted the cricket ball with all sections of the stadium’s roof.

I wish to take nothing away from these men’s obvious talent or the hours of ‘range-hitting’ practice they must have put in. But this supposedly thrilling, pulsating exhibition of modern-day cricket left me cold. Something is surely wrong when mishits and shots hit from unbalanced positions sail not just over the boundary rope but several rows into the stands. The wily spinner who has induced a leading edge, the hardworking pacer who has made the batsman hurry into a pull must feel extremely hard done by.

John Arlott once famously described a Clive Lloyd pull as ‘the stroke of a man knocking a thistle top off with a walking stick.’ Had the celebrated commentator watched Lloyd’s compatriot at the Chinnaswamy Stadium, he’d have been put in mind not of thistle tops and walking sticks but of fortress gates and battering rams. And with good reason. During the broadcast an interesting clip was shown from a pre-match practice session. It showed Warner going over to Gayle, chatting with him, one friendly competitor to another, and clasping his hand. He then tried to lift Gayle’s bat, miming his astonishment as he realised how heavy it was. Now Warner is no stripling, and from all accounts wields a chunky piece of willow himself, so this one must have been pretty substantial.

I remember reading one of those ‘weird but true’ stories in a cricket book when I was a boy. Apparently a batsman in the days of yore –- possibly sometime in the nineteenth century –- turned up for a match with a bat as wide as the stumps, and proceeded to position it exactly in front of them in a quite literal exhibition of stonewalling. The cartoon accompanying the story showed some exasperated fielders approaching the pitch with knives to whittle the bat down to a decent size.

Since then, of course, rules have been framed to limit the width of the cricket bat – but not, it appears, its thickness. As far as I can make out from the MCC’s rather complex laws of the game (available at lords.org), there’s a maximum length for the cricket bat (38 inches) and a maximum width (4.25 inches), but no maximum thickness and no maximum weight (Law 6, Appendix E). How can this be the case when the ball is of a standard size and weight?

Bats have certainly evolved in the direction of heftiness. Tendulkar, no slogger, has graduated from the thin bat (in the days of the Power label) to his current muscle-flexers. Even Rahul Dravid’s bat, one of the thinner ones around, is noticeably thicker than his preferred blade at the time of his Test debut. But in the absence of any clear regulation, bats are becoming more and more like Hanuman’s mace (this was especially true of the Mongoose -– it is perhaps no coincidence that some of Matt Hayden’s CSK teammates nicknamed him ‘Namakkal Anjaneyar’, in a reference to the giant Hanuman statue in Namakkal).

It is all very well to say that the game is evolving, that players and spectators must keep up with it. But it does not evolve of its own accord: the cricket establishment must take responsibility for the direction in which it changes. Tennis saw it fit to make the balls fluffier and heavier in the Nineties when it was felt that the game was becoming too boring, the points too short. Cricket is now introducing new balls from either end in ODIs, and several other innovations have been touted as making the contest between bat and ball more even. For that reason, and to preserve the aesthetic value of the game, perhaps it is time to make a more fundamental change. It’s time to prune the bats.

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