Do the bats bat for you?

By Rajadhyax

I have often heard TV commentators state emphatically that modern day cricketers stroke the ball so well due to the advances in cricket equipment and especially the bats. Tony Greg and Ian Chappell are notable among them. David Gower or Arun Lal would not necessarily agree with them while guys like Harsha Bhogle and Ravi Shastri sit on the fence on this issue. Now, admittedly the new cricket equipment is better and it does increase the comfort levels of a batsman. It also leaves less of injuries in the bargain and is generally lighter to provide free speed on the legs. For those concerned about TV cameras, it is sleek and better looking too. But to state that it is just the bats or even to say that ‘mainly’ it is the bats that generate so much of power is both churlish and inadvisable. It also robs the modern day batsmen of their deserving credit. You expect men like Chappell to know more!

If a Yuvraj Singh or a Muhamed Yusuf just pushes the ball without a great swing of the bat and it races to the boundary, these comments abound. I once decided to check the validity of the argument. My investigations took me first to a couple of local bat makers and their methods. I was shocked to know that bat manufacturing is done more or less with a very similar process as thirty years back, with just some minor changes. The material, willow, is the same, the pressure rolls are same and the drying system is also the same. The handle grip rubber is same, the inner cane is same and so is the thread that binds it. The machines that have changed are mainly in the field of improving the efficiency of manufacturing and cost reduction. Thus the bat makers say (off the record, since saying it in public would adversely affect their sales) that new bats do not necessarily generate more power – a marginal difference in power generation may have occurred over the years and that too in some select brands / models.

As compared to 70 years back, the bats are surely different but since the last thirty years not a lot has changed. This came as a surprise to me since TV commentators are held to be experts and one thought they would cross-check before making comments on international networks. That the modern day batsmen could have done a lot of difference by their strength training, video analysis to improve timing, power workouts, protein oriented diets and attitudinal difference is often not acknowledged.

Cricket has become more aggressive and competitive over the years and this has made the batsmen come up with more effort to create that additional power. Average practice time of a batsman today is many hours more per week than a batsman of 1940s or 1950s. This also may be responsible for the rasping square cuts and fierce pull shots that race to the boundary line. And yes, to all this we may add a subtle bit of help from bats that are meaty in the middle and yet lighter today than they were in 1940s.

Thus it is acceptable to acknowledge bat manufacturing as one of the ‘minor’ reasons for cracking shots instead of holding it as the ‘main’ reason of it. Besides, some times it may even be a prejudice that evokes needless comments. For instance, Tony Greg talks about the bats when an Indian batsman makes the shot and not when Adam Gilchrist used to do so.

Batsmen today play as if their life depended on it. In the process some of them let go all their muscular strength in the swing and follow through. This also makes the ball go faster. Many old cricketers I met acknowledged that less professionalism and competitiveness perhaps meant that such no-holds-barred batsmen were very rare in their time. Today every major team has almost two to four of them. “Grace and touch was more the order of the day all those years back”, one said. Silken glances and late-cuts were the sort of shots most commonly employed. There would be some rare C.K. Nayadu or two of the three Ws of West Indies (Weekes, Worrell and Walcott) who would go hammer and tongs at the ball.

So a 119-meters six from the bat of Yuvraj or a fence breaking drive from Kevin Petersen need not be merely due to good bats but also due to super batsmanship. Amen!