A win in the willow

The cricket bat industry is steeped in tradition yet must move with the times to meet demand, opening a lucrative door for landowners in the process

- James Fisher

AS SOCIETY evolves, so too does sport. The past century has seen technological change seep through so many of our greatest pastimes. Football boots and balls are light years ahead of what they were back in 1966. The movements of every professional rugby player are tracked and analysed for maximum performance. Racing bikes are lighter; shotguns and rifles are more accurate. Gone are the cat-gut strings and wooden frames of the tennis racket, replaced by complex composite materials that provide the apex of power and precision. Tradition can only cling on for so long when faced with the pressures of ever-increasing performance.

When it comes to the summer sport of cricket, however, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Timeless test matches have been reduced to five days, then to four, then to 50 overs, then to T20. White clothing is seen less and less, the pyjamas more and more. But, pyjamas and palatability aside, the sport remains at its heart a competition between bat and ball, near-identical to the sport that a certain WG Grace would have been playing in the late 19th century. The balls are red leather wrapped around a cork core. The bats are blades of English willow, Salix alba ‘Caerulea’, produced by businesses such as Gunn & Moore and Gray-Nicolls, two firms whose history pre-dates the Test match.