Cricket – A Batsman’s Game (Mangoose Bat Patent)

This post was first published on 28th February, 2011.

Nowadays, cricket is believed to be a batsman’s game. When people start playing cricket, they usually prefer to try their hands on batting more than bowling and fielding.

This passion for batting is one of the main reasons why today cricket pitches are mostly flat and batsman friendly. The international cricketers are no exception and they have tried various things with their bat to improve their batting performance, some of them were also in the midst of controversies.

Controversies related to bat started in the match between Surrey v Hampshire on September 1771, when the player named White from Surrey brought a bat which had the width of the stumps and effectively defended his stumps from the bowler. This incident is considered to be the reason why the laws of game were amended in 1774, limiting the maximum width of the bat to 4¼ inches. Other than this, Dennis Lillee using an aluminum bat, Ricky Ponting using a carbon graphite bat and Sanath Jayasuriya using an iron spring inside his bat are some of the controversies because of which the laws of the game were amended, specifying that bats had to be made only from wood. Master Blaster Sachin Tendulkar too experimented with his bat to improve sweet spot of his bat by using a heavy weight bat weighing close to 3.2lbs which was considered to be the cause of his tennis elbow injury.

Despite all these controversies, cricketers are still experimenting with their bat. Recently, Australian batsman Mathew Hayden came up with the unconventional bat in IPL 2010 and whacked the cricket ball all over the park. Many of us would want to know about the unconventional bat which looks like a baby’s rattle in Hayden’s hands.  So, I performed a quick search and came to know about the Mongoose bat.

Inventor, Fernandez, Marcus Codrincjton invented “A cricket sports bat” and filed for a patent (AU 2009252935 A1) in the year 2009. The invention has been assigned to “MONGOOSE CRICKET LIMITED” and is known as a Mongoose bat.

The Mongoose bat has an elongated handle and truncated or shortened blade. Normally, in cricket bats, the sweet spot will be the point where the blade has a maximum thickness and in traditional bats, the front face of the bat will be rectangular in shape and the rear surface will be convex/ V shaped. Therefore, the sweet spot of the traditional blades decreases from the point of maximum thickness towards the sides, toe and shoulders of the bat and when the ball hits the bat at any spot other than sweet spot, there is always a danger of ball taking an edge of bat and flying to fielders. In order to overcome this drawback, Marcus invented the bat that has the ratio of the length of the blade to the width of the blade in the range of 4:1 -3.25:1 and also he made the blade 33% shorter than a conventional bat and the handle is 43% longer. Shortening the length of the blade results in a lighter bat with an extended sweet spot that has good hitting qualities equivalent to the heavier traditional bat.

The experiments with bats continue and I am sure we will see more and more inventions as the game takes different levels.

Authored by Nirmal

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