World Cricket: Ross Taylor

 

05/09

Ross Taylor, Samoa

27/08

Revealed: Cricket is running out of BATS - here's why the IPL, climate change and expensive trees are all to blame... as we take you inside the race against time to save the sport from an existential crisis

Lawrence Booth

A recurrent grumble during the recent England–India series concerned the state of the Dukes ball, with fingers pointed in every direction – including at the Aberdeen Angus cows who supply the leather. But behind the scenes, another equipment-related headache has been raging. And they’re calling it the ‘cricket bat emergency’.

In a nutshell: there aren’t enough trees. Or at least there aren’t enough trees of the kind needed to make cricket bats.

English willow has always been the sport’s wood of choice. Kashmir has a huge willow market, producing around two millions bat clefts a year, but the quality is variable; so does Serbia, believe it or not, though only 100,000 clefts a year, and again the quality is unreliable. Poplar, the next-best alternative, has been tried, and there have even been experiments with bamboo, but they did not go well.

To complicate matters, the willow has to be grown in the UK. When cuttings were sent to Australia, the wood grew too quickly, which made it brittle. When they were sent to New Zealand, the trees were damaged by the wind, which will come as no surprise to anyone who has covered a Test match in Wellington. All told, then, English willow – salix alba caerulea to its mates – is where it’s at.

Like money, however, willow doesn’t grow on trees: it is the tree. And those trees are struggling to keep pace with a demand for high-quality bats that has exploded, especially since the end of the pandemic, and especially on the subcontinent, where the sport’s economy continues to boom beyond the capitalists’ wildest dreams.

The repercussions have been inevitable: with supply chains unable to balance the equation, prices have shot up. A good bat might now set you back the best part of £1,000, which is a blow to cricket’s attempts to shake off old accusations about elitism. And that’s before you factor in the cost of pads, helmets, gloves and the rest.

The economics of willow growth sounds like one of the more obscure specialist subjects on Mastermind, but it helps explain why the sport – led by MCC – is now exploring other means of producing bats good enough to survive everything thrown at them.

JS Wright & Sons, who have led the industry ever since WG Grace approached Jessie Samuel Wright in 1894 to request a supply of willow, say their trees take between 12 and 20 years to reach maturity and be ready to become bats.

The trouble is no one accounted for the post-IPL boom in India, which meant the quantity of willow planted back then is insufficient to meet modern needs. As Rob Lynch, MCC’s director of cricket operations, put it during the recent World Cricket Connects conference at Lord’s: ‘The situation is becoming unsustainable.’

JS Wright, who claim to produce three-quarters of the world’s English willow bats, planted around 15,000 trees 20 years ago, and have now upped that figure to more than 40,000. One tree, well tended, can produce 40 bat clefts, and the company are assiduous about replacing every felled tree with three or four new ones. This year, they have produced 700,000 clefts.

But even sustainable planning in the here and now leaves an issue in the short- to medium-term. ‘Not enough competitors have planted enough trees,’ said Jeremy Ruggles, a director at JS Wright for over 30 years.

The problem starts at the top, with the best players now getting through bats at a rate once considered unthinkable – three a year has become more like 15 or 20. And with ever more Indian stars now signing bat sponsorship deals worth around $1m (£740,000), the companies have to claw their money back somewhere.

Players train more, too, and – thanks to the IPL and other T20 franchise tournaments, which seem to be growing rather faster than salix alba – hit the ball more ferociously. They also train more regularly against the harder new ball. All this adds to wear and tear. Tree prices, meanwhile, are said to have trebled since 2017.

Then there’s climate change, which has meant milder winters in the UK and accelerated tree growth. Things get a little technical here, but essentially fast growth leads to wider grains, and that in turn produces bats which require longer to knock in. Pros, inevitably, prefer the ready-to-go narrower-grain bats.

What to do, then, while the willow-growing industry catches up with demand, and attempts to keep at bay a crisis that could make cricket accessible only to those who can afford it?

One alternative is laminated bats, pieced together from two or three pieces of wood, with an English willow face backed by lower-grade wood. These bats are already allowed in junior cricket, but remain illegal in the professional game, where there are concerns over the small advantage they provide the batsman - a lighter pick-up with more power.

There is also the possibility that manufacturers might hide other performance-enhancing material between the bits of wood, such as high-density foam. Short of sawing bats in two to verify their authenticity, this would be hard to police.

Non-wooden material remains up for discussion, too, though the sport has never quite got over the controversy caused by the aluminium bat used by Dennis Lillee during a Test against England at Perth in 1979.

And while some kind of metal would ease the strain on the willow industry, and make the game more affordable, it might also take cricket down a path it is reluctant to explore: as bowlers keep telling us, bats are already powerful enough.

Whatever happens next, and assuming the likes of JS Wright & Sons overcome the crisis, may depend on how successfully the sport can unite its disparate strands and produce an over-arching solution.

MCC, whose excellent work in the background has a habit of being overlooked, want to host an industry-wide conference in the next few months to explore options.

The crisis can be averted. But it is far from over.