Taming The Bat

Over the past decade, cricket bats with massive swell and thick edges became weapons for bowlers’ destruction. But now, the ICC hopes to restore the balance by freezing the dimensions of the willow.

- Jasvinder Sidhu

ABOUT FOUR YEARS ago, Australian cricket legend and ex-India coach Greg Chappell ignited the debate about monster bats tilting the balance of the game in favour of batsmen. He argued in one of his newspaper columns that Donald Bradman would have averaged over 120 with modern bats and would have been unstoppable. Chappell further wrote that Bradman must be turning in his grave, seeing how the game is being distorted by these bats. In effect, the straight-talking Aussie set the proverbial cat among the pigeons.

Chappell made a valid case, pointing to the way modern-day batsmen, even those making up the lower order or the tail, brutalise quality bowlers in all formats of the game. The ease with which batsmen seem to hit the ball out of the park, often lodging it in the stands or parking lots, shows the imbalance between the bat and the ball. Chappell is not alone in his observation. Another former Australian captain, and a great in his own right, Ricky Ponting, too lent his weight to the campaign against “weapons of bowlers’ destruction.”

“We feel that in the last few years it has actually gone a little bit too far in the favour of batsmen,” Ponting said. “We can’t make the grounds bigger, so certainly one of the concerns was the middle of the bat, because the shape of the bat is increasingly getting bigger and bigger every year.”