Best of Spin 6: the story of the Mongoose, cricket’s tiny new bat

First published in Spin magazine, July 2009

In a studio five minutes walk from London Bridge, the Australian cricketer Stuart Law is swishing a bat around and being filmed, by a video crew and two photographers. The bat Law is wielding appears to be crazily small – about two-thirds the size of a normal bat in fact. It does not look as if it might be something that a player like Law, who has played in World Cup finals and been a professional for the last 20 years, might ever contemplate using in a serious match.

In fact, he already has used a version of the bat, in a game for Derbyshire against Essex the previous week.

He scored 95 with it.

There have been no changes to the basic design of a cricket bat for over 200 years, until the development of this bat – the Mongoose. Over the course of the day, its inventor, a club cricketer and ex-advertising man called Marcus Codrington Fernandez, will be outlining his one-man mission to convert the cricket world to using smaller bats; very much smaller bats.

The MCC approved the Mongoose – six inches shorter in the blade than a standard bat – 12 months ago. Why wouldn’t they? While the rules on bats are strict and detailed – Ricky Ponting’s carbon-backed Kookaburras, for example, were shown the door back in 2006 –  the notion that a smaller hitting area might provide a player with any kind of advantage comes straight from left-field. The main principle of the bat laws are that the bat must not be wider than four-and-a-quarter inches and that both handle and blade must be made of wood.

The Mongoose complies.

Codrington Fernandez used the Mongoose himself through last season. He averaged 80 in club cricket when for the last 25 years he had, he says, always averaged 37. He says he took a lot of stick off opposition players when he walked to the middle with his tiny bat. But the stick tended to last only until he had played an attacking shot, until they had seen exactly how much more powerful the Mongoose was than the conventional bat.

At first glance, the whole story seems to make no sense at all. But it works like this: 1) batsmen hardly ever use the very top part of their bat; and never use it to score runs, only as a matter of last-ditch defence. 2) Taking the virtually useless wood from that very top section and moving it further down gives a meaty blade with very thick edges that feels at once like a weapon and, because of the longer handle, as light as, if not lighter, than a regular bat. 3) Having a longer handle gives this meatier little bat a lot of extra whip and bat speed through the ball increases dramatically.

This was the theory, cooked up by Codrington Fernandez after – as we shall learn – watching Geoffrey Boycott on youtube a little over a year ago.

Acting on a hunch, Codrington Fernandez – immensely charming, obsessed with cricket, the perfect front man – made a prototype, petitioned the MCC and asked Imperial College London to test his theories. Dr Anthony Bull’s team at Imperial’s department of biomechanical engineering, which specialises in testing sports equipment, came back with encouraging results: yes, the prototype did have a bigger sweet spot than normal bats; it could achieve bat-speeds up to 20 per cent higher from the same effort from the batsman.

The next part of his mission was to take the science and the genius idea and turn it into a commercial proposition by convincing the world of cricket that he had something.

Codrington Fernandez spent the winter months taking the bat round the world showing it to people, asking professionals what they made of it. The bat – built for players who need to attack every ball – seemed ideal for Twenty20. He showed it, informally, to Kevin Pietersen; Andrew Flintoff; Dimitri Mascarenhas; Yuvraj Singh; later, it was shown around at net sessions at Surrey and Middlesex and Somerset. Players were intrigued. Some were left unconvinced, concerned they would feel naked against pace bowlers on bouncy pitches. Others were more receptive, but already contracted to big manufacturers; one big-name Indian player was apparently keen to use it – but also keen to get $1.5m a year in return for doing so.

That was not an option.

In the end, the fit came down to two of the world’s top one-day players: Stuart Law and Lou Vincent, as well as England women’s players Ebony Rainford-Brent and Laura Marsh. (Codrington Fernandez is convinced the Mongoose could revolutionise the women’s game.)

Which is how we got here. London Bridge. May 14, 2009.

SPIN When did you first think of this idea?

Marcus Codrington Fernandez The inspiration was Geoff Boycott. I was watching him bat on youtube – Number of hits: 3 and you know the other two were Geoff Boycott. He was always a great hero of mine. It was noticeable that he wasn’t trying to hit the ball hard: he was trying to stay in. And his bat seemed the right tool for the job. And that’s what people had been trying to do throughout the 20th century: stay in and accumulate runs.

Then I watched the IPL – this was last year – and it struck me that the batsman’s job now has changed: it is no longer about staying in but about hitting the ball harder and trying to score off a many balls as possible. And yet they were using the same tool as Boycott had, to do a completely different job. I thought cricket had fundamentally changed but the equipment hadn’t. It didn’t seem to make sense.

As I kid, I used to go to Hunts County and get bats made, so I knew the process. Which is very simple. You get two bits of wood, conjoin them and cut them up. And once you know that, you can start thinking of ways of adapting that process. If I hadn’t had that basic knowledge of the principles of making bats I don’t think this would have happened at all.

Why so much shorter – wouldn’t something less radical have been easier to sell?

MCF We know that, at this size, you increase bat speed by between 11 and 20 per cent which makes an enormous difference. The difficulty was getting the splice out of the blade – if you have a shorter blade with a splice in it, you’re making a greater percentage of the area of the bat redundant; you can only defend with the part of the bat with the splice, not score runs. So we spent a good few months with Hunts County developing prototypes where we eventually worked out how to take the splice out of the blade. And it went from being a curious idea into being a commercial possibility.

You have been a decent cricketer yourself, haven’t you?

MCF I had trials with Somerset and Northants when I was 16 or 17 and didn’t get offered anything. But to be honest I was never good enough or committed enough by any means. I was playing for Bedfordshire at that time. I played until I was 16 or 17, I suppose…

Stuart, tell us about the first time you met Marcus and saw the Mongoose…

Stuart Law It was in the showers in the away dressing room at Taunton. Paul Prichard from the PCA – who had been approached by Marcus for help – rang me and said, ‘Don’t dismiss this guy straight away’ because some of the pros had taken one look at it and said, ‘Get that out of here.’ But I’m open-minded. Marcus showed me and I was like, ‘Okay, that’s different.’ Then he explained the reasoning behind it – and to be honest picking it up and having it in my hands showed me what I needed to know: it did increase bat-speed without my changing my stroke or putting in extra effort.

I took it in the indoor school and got Andy Brown, the Derbyshire assistant coach, to throw me a few and the second one nearly took his head off!

I thought, ‘Okay this is serious’.

I’ve never been a power hitter. I’ve always been a timer of the ball. But if anything can help your bat-speed without you losing your shape; if you can increase your power not by doing anything different but by using something different. You don’t have to lift more weights to hit the ball harder – it’s the Holy Grail of increasing bat speed through the ball.

Don’t you have any concerns without having a top to the bat?

MCF There’s a very small percentage of balls that hit the very top of the bat. It’s counter intuitive. When you look at it, it doesn’t look like it’s going to work, even though there’s logic behind it and there’s a rational process behind it that seems to make sense. You still have to get your head round playing with it. Once you play with it yourself then you get convinced quite quickly. When you see Stuart play in the nets with it, he can still play a straight bat back foot defensive shot in the way cricketers always have done.

SL [Miming a very correct back-foot defensive shot]. But if you’re playing Twenty20 cricket, which is where this is targeted and you’re playing that shot, then you’re Geoffrey Boycott. Look, I was a bit sceptical about what you do if the ball bounces above your waist. But you don’t use the very top of the bat to defend like that, in any case. And in Twenty20 you’re not looking to defend you’re looking to attack.

People will see this as a gimmick – until they use it and feel the difference it creates. 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 increase their bat speed with massive bats… well, if MS Dhoni used this instead, he’d double it his bat-speed.

How has it gone down at Derby?

SL You get the old traditionalists like the coaching staff who aren’t too sure. Then the young kids who are raving about it. The guys who’ve actually hit with it, say ‘It works’. They know where it’s coming from.

There are different scenarios: if it’s the last five overs of a 50-over game or a batting powerplay and they’re bowling yorkers, this is the perfect bat. Perfect for facing spin. And if you’re in a 50-over game and there’s been a no-ball, and you’ve got a free hit… you can have the 12th man bring it on.

At this point, Law hadn’t used the short-short version of the bat – the MMI 3 – in a match. but he had used a slightly more conventional version – the COR 3. The principle of this bigger bat is the same – a shorter blade, but only by an inch or so – and it has the same advantages over a conventional bat, just on a less extreme scale.

SL You look at them and you’d think they weight about 5lb – but they weight about 2 lb ten. The edges on them are seriously big. Against Northants I was playing cut shots off the toe of the bat and they were speeding away for four. If you just get good contact of the ball on any part of the bat – and it really goes.

Ten days later, Law brings out the Mongoose MMI in Derbyshire’s first Twenty20 game of the season. He is well set on 32 at the time and proceeds to hit 10 more runs off six balls – including a massive, but effortless, six over mid-wicket – before he is run out.

Afterwards, Codrington Fernandez says that he had been more nervous than he
had ever been in his life, even on his
wedding day. He spends the next day trying to finalise a deal for a player to use one in the ICC World Twenty20.

The Mongoose is out there.

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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.

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