World’s top cricketers pick up tiny new bat

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News that some of the world’s top cricketers are considering using a bat that is 33 per cent smaller (yes: 33 per cent smaller) than the standard will be filtering onto the wires today.

I first heard about the Mongoose back in February when I met its inventor Marcus Codrington Fernandez. I’ve been following his progress ever since as he looks to persuade the world to use a bat that’s effectively six inches ‘too short’. We have a four-page feature on his mission in the July issue of SPIN, coming out on June 5.

The theory is this: 1) batsmen hardly ever use the very top part of their bat - and certainly not to play attacking shots and score runs with. 2) If you take all that ‘wasted’ wood from the top part of the bat, you can use it further down in the blade, making the (shorter) blade as thick as a brick and more powerful. 3) In having a longer handle, the blade has more ‘whip’. Though the bat is more powerful, it is the same overall weight as a conventional bat - but in effect feels lighter, because the longer handle offers greater leverage.

Codrington Fernandez and his partners at Hunts County bats have also devised a way to not have the splice within the blade - so the blade of the Mongoose is pure hitting area, pure sweet spot. Tests at Imperial College have shown all this, apparently, to be true. 

Reaction within the game - as Codrington Fernandez has trawled the off-season county grounds showing his wares to players - has been generally positive, despite pockets of scorn. Pietersen, Flintoff, Mascarenhas and Yuvraj Singh have all seen it, as have representatives of at least one major IPL team.

Bat deals are complicated (and expensive) yet Codrington Fernandez has two of the world’s top one-day players on board for his launch at Lord’s this morning, namely Stuart Law and Lou Vincent, as well as the England women players Laura Marsh and Ebony Rainford-Brent. (He thinks the bat could revolutionise the women’s game.)

Law is already using a version of the Mongoose in one-day games for Derbyshire - not quite an extreme a version as the headline product, it’s true, but still a bat with a blade that is an inch shorter than usual, and no splice within the blade. He hit 95 with it against Essex the other week.

“People will see this as a gimmick - until they actually use it and feel the difference it creates,” Law told me last week. “If you look at a lot of the slower pitches around the world, places like the sub-continent where the ball doesn’t really bounce above waist high. The guys over there, like MS Dhoni, increase their bat speed with massive heavy bats. Well, this is going to double it.”

The bat has been approved by the MCC and has its official launch at Lord’s this morning.

It is understood Codrington Fernandez is in advanced stages of talks with a player to use it in the men’s ICC World Twenty20 tournament. Law, meanwhile, has committed to using it in at least some part of his innings against Durham in the Twenty20 Cup on Tuesday.

Despite the surge of publicity – with an appearance on BBC Breakfast News and the Today programme - Mongoose is a cottage industry and is not geared up with thousands of bats in stock. Rather, initially, each order will be custom-made which, at a price of £159, is a deal that compares favourably with other top-of-the-range bats.

We’ll have a full feature on the development of the Mongoose and Marcus Codrington Fernandez’s mission in the next issue of SPIN.

Subscribe to SPIN magazine today and get a FREE copy of the 2009 Cricketers Who’s Who, worth £18.99