Phil Space: Inertial designed

Ad for Slazenger's 2009 bat, The Blade:

'Blade's unique profile delivers Slazenger's first inertial designed bat. The strategically crafted rear edge profile increases bat torsion stability to improve shot accuracy and performance'.

The fact that this copy comes with the exquisitely-tooled pay-off line 'As endorsed by Paul Collingwood' might have you thinking the whole thing is a wind-up, a discerning howl in the dark at the inexorable attachment of marketing bollocks to something as noble and beautiful as the cricket bat, but alas no. It's real.

The need to re-sell a product that has limited opportunities for redesign or innovation has led to the heightened language manufacturers are using, yet what they really need is a different kind of gimmick. Like any natural thing, willow comes in cycles, it has good years and bad. Maybe they should start selling it like wine, by vintage. 2009 - now that was a helluva year...

Seduced

Further to the post below, Ceci wondered what drives sales of bats to club players. It's a good question. A while ago I had the chance to speak to Rob Pack, who made bats for Puma [he's a bowler himself, naturally...] and the subject arose. He looked up from his drawknife and said wearily, 'the stickers. You've got to have good stickers these days...'

He wasn't being entirely serious, but they play a role. A new design that catches on works, too*. Classics like the Gray-Nicolls scoop [awesome bats, got my first ever hundred with one] and its offshoot the four-scoop that Gower used [I think] on his Test debut; Stuart Surridge's immortal Jumbo, wielded by Goochie and King Viv; the Slazenger V12 with its cool little hump on the back, and so on. 

The right endorsee plays into it too. Saint Peter got big on the back of Tony Greig wearing the mittens; Duncan Fearnley had Beefy during the 1981 Ashes; Woodworm were briefly huge with Flintoff and KP on board.

Ultimately though, I've only ever bought a bat on feel. Sometimes I've come out of the shop surprised by what I've gone for. I suspect a lot of people are the same. Would love to know, too, about the market in India and Pakistan, where the big makes aren't ones we see too often here. 

* There has to be a market now for retro bats. I'd love another scoop, however counter-intuitive the design. In the meantime, Jrod is debuting the Hawk, which will be worth reading...

Thick as a brick

Okay, I was almost ready to entertain the counter-intuitive concept of the Mongoose, the bat that Stuart Law reckons will 'take the world by storm'.

It all looked vaguely plausible as Stuey waved it around in the nets, and then Mongoose brought out their second advocate. It was er, Devon Malcolm.

Devon Malcolm: 40 Tests, 236 runs, ave 6.05; 304 first class matches, 1985 runs, ave 7.84; batting described on cricinfo as 'court jester standard'.

NB: Manufacturers sense opportunity in T20 like everyone else. The Mongoose follows Gray-Nicolls' Dual T20, a bat with a use no-one has yet figured out. There will be no one-size fits all 'revolution' because bats are individual things serving idiosyncratic users. The inventor of the Mongoose has just been on Sky News. He used to be a marketing man. That figures, somehow. 

Breaking: Ceci finds rare image of Devon at the crease. Must have been shot on a fast exposure.

Objects of Fetish iii: talk dirty to me

Quiz: Which of the following are cricket bats and which are cars?

Turbo, Libro, Mettle, Steelback, Boomslang, Glory, Harlequin, Xiphos, Stealth, Vendetta, Catalyst, Hero, Ignite, Incurza, Ice, Pellara, Venom, Scimitar, Recurve, Predator, Advance.

Yes, well, trick question of course. They're all bats, although it's not beyond the realms of possibility that they are all cars as well. They are a part of the new language of cricket, or rather the new language of selling cricket. Bats - the good ones at least - are made the old way, but they are described and sold in the new way.

The new language has much in common with the language of cars. It's full of machismo, it's designed for men. Someone, somewhere is coming up with words like 'Xiphos' and 'Incurza', some real - Xiphos means sword; some invented - Incurza means nothing, but suggests some kind of heroic invasion. 

Someone, somewhere is writing copy for the brochures and websites, too, copy that describes a  'massive profile',  'mid swell', 'steep spine', 'huge sweet spot', 'extreme edge', 'imposing appearance'. Who wouldn't feel good looking down and seeing that lot in their hands?

It's a con, of course, and a fine one. Batting is about repetition and desire, and anything that involves repetition and desire invites ritual. Bats are fetishistic things, they are invested with emotion, with the dreams of what they can do. Every bat in the world is individual. You can pick up five that weigh the same and each one will feel unique. The same bat will feel different day to day, different depending on your mood. In the best possible way, they are intimate things.

Bat makers have made their language emotive, but when you're choosing one you must resist their words and their stickers. All that matters is how it feels when you hold it in your hands. And now I'm sounding like them.

A new bat is a meaningful purchase. They're not commodities, they are things of beauty, made by artists. They're seductive enough without the new language. 

And check out Jrod's new thing - it started me off. Bats do that.

Objects of fetish (ii)

This is a thing of beauty. Millichamp & Hall make cricket bats at the county ground in Taunton, at the rate of about five per day. There's something timeless about that. You won't see too many M&H bats in the hands of international players, and if you do, you won't know it because their rather lovely logos will be peeled off and replaced by someone else's. 

Instead, some less traditional words - I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and call them words - than Millichamp and Hall will be buzzing around: Pellara, Incurza and Libro have been confirmed as the adidas range.  

adidas won't be making bats, but buying them in and stickering them. And what stickers they are. They're the product of selling into an information-overloaded age. They've been designed for minimal attention spans, for people who are used to looking at everything and nothing at the same time. 

Selling cricket bats has always been in part about selling illusions. But if you buy from manufacturers who employ their own batmakers you are almost always holding a bat shaped by the same tools and hands as the bats used by their pros. 

For most players, I think, bats are fetishistic things, taken out and looked at, held, touched. You invest emotions in them, when you buy them and when you use them. You need to feel connected to them. I've seen KP looking at his bats in the past. I know that look. He isn't going to be using anything from a factory job lot that's for sure, however much adidas are paying him. 

Nostalgia is rolled into it. M&H have this. Stuart Surridge will even sell you a Jumbo, and doesn't that baby look good after all these years? If Gray-Nicolls made a retro Scoop, I'd buy one just for old times sake - and so would Brian Lara. Well, Brian probably wouldn't have to pay for his. 

adidas will sell lots of bats, but I'm not sure they'll understand why. M&H won't sell as many, but I know which one I covet.

Related post: Objects of fetish (i) is here.

Objects of fetish

The crash and burn of Woodworm, flash bat providers to KP and Andrew Flintoff, wasn't quite on the scale of Lehmann Bros, but just as the IPL and Stanford Super Series carry vague echoes of Kerry Packer's circus, so Woodworm immediately brought St Peter to mind.

St Peter, with their graphically beautiful SP logo, burst into the consciousness by signing one of the biggest stars of the day, Tony Greig, to front them. Greig not only used the bat but debuted the classic 'mitts', the one-piece batting gloves that became instant objects of fetish. After a century of lumpen sausage gloves (and even spikes for the nets) how sleek and 21st century were Greiggy's mitts. Club grounds were soon awash with SP bats and gloves. If I remember correctly, even King Viv had a brief SP flirtation post Jumbo and before Duncan Fearnley. Then as soon as they had arrived, they were gone (although a cursory search reveals you can still pick up SP bats in Oz).

The Batsman landed an SP from a bloke my father met on a building site. It was far too heavy for my puny early adolescent wrists but the pull of the logo was great. I used it the first time I batted through an innings (instant nostalgia: first bat I scored a fifty with was a Slazenger, first hundred with a Gray Nicolls Scoop (!), thousand runs in a season for the first time with a County: Christ I can even remember how each one smelt. The two best I ever held were a Slazenger V12 that belonged to a teammate - I was still in and using it when he came to the wicket; he was saintly enough not to demand it back at that moment - and a short-handled Jumbo in a sale at a shop in Kingston (Surrey, not Jamaica) that picked up like a wand and that I've always regretted not buying).

Selecting and using bats looms heavily in the psyche of almost every batsman (see Marcus Trescothick's recent autobiography, and Ramps' devotion to the Gray Nicolls Predator that took him to the hundred hundreds). When you pick up a bat that you're going to use, you just know. You have to be strong if it's a make you don't favour. 

KP will now front adidas's assault on the bat market, while Freddie looked like he was using Puma out in Antigua. The Batsman has met Puma's batmaker and can testify to his talent. He did, however, look up from his lathe and lament, "it all depends how good your stickers are these days..."

NB: The names of bats used to reflect their shape or heritage: Jumbo, Scoop, Signature etc. Now they're becoming as nonsensical as car brands. The adidas range are called Incurza, Libra and Pellara. Which one are you?