Return of the King

Is the Scoop the most important bat ever made?

Just look at it… (we couldn’t bring ourselves to give this one a green hue

This week, social media (well, my Twitter feed) was awash with the news of the revival of the GN-100, best-known as the Scoop, bat of dreams, the bat with which Lara set records that will never be broken and with which I got my first ever hundred. And that was the point of the Scoop - it was a bat that made you feel something, that had a bit of magic about it, that split the atom and showed that cricket bats could be something more than the purely functional, almost identical objects that they had been for a century before it arrived.

Gray-Nicolls say they’re making 50 of this run, each numbered. There are very few other bats that draw so hard on nostalgia, yet that seem so counter-intuitive to a new generation used to giant, high-performing, weapons-grade willow. When I was writing Bat, Ball & Field, I wanted to do something on willow and bats and their fundamental meaning to the game. It had a section on the creation of the Scoop, so rather than rewrite it, I thought I’d put the whole thing up here:

                                          The Wood That Makes The Bats

I once met a batmaker who told me about his greatest fear. His name was Chris King. We were stood outside in the yard where the newly-felled willow was kept. Huge, fresh-cut trees were stacked on their sides, their bark the colour and texture of elephant hide. The trunks showed their ferocious capacity for growth: they had gone from the height of a toddler to twenty metres tall in fewer than twenty years. As a piece of natural engineering they were awesome. The giant trunks were actually a network of slender tubes designed to draw water from the roots to the leaves as rapidly as possible. They thrived in moderate climates and damp ground, and a few corners of farmers’ fields in England were perfect for them.

The trees that make cricket bats are one of four hundred varieties of willow, a genus called white willow – Salix Alba - named for the colour of the underside of its leaves rather than the wood. Humans have used Salix Alba for ten thousand years because it is tough yet pliable and doesn’t splinter easily, rendering it perfect for weaving baskets and making tools. Tannin from the bark was used for tanning leather. Willow charcoal was a component in gunpowder. The Greeks and the Romans believed in its medicinal power to reduce fever, and they were right: Salix Alba’s bark extract salicylic acid is a metabolite of aspirin. Within the genus there were many cultivars and hybrids that grew across Europe and Asia. In England, Salix Alba Caerulea, which had a single, fast growing stem of a trunk, became the wood that made every high-grade cricket bat in the world.

And the batmaker’s greatest fear was a simple one, that Salix Caerulea would one day fall victim to a plague or a blight like Dutch Elm Disease or Ash Dieback that had destroyed other species. It was a bit like the meteor strike on the dinosaurs. It would happen eventually, and the meteors were out there, orbiting - Watermark Disease and Willow Anthracnose and who knew what else. Cricket was uniquely vulnerable because only bats made from Caerulea offered the precise balance between bat and ball on which the game survived.

Batmakers had tried to make bats from other types of Salix woods. Kashmir willow was the closest match, and produced a perfectly serviceable bat. But because it had lived with less moisture, it had a deadening hardness to it. In batsman’s parlance, the ball wouldn’t ‘ping’ in the same way from Kashmiri willow. A bat made from Kashmir sold for a tenth of the price of one made from high-grade English willow. Other woods had been tried too, mainly Ash and Poplar, but none performed in the same way. Cricket and English willow were inextricably bound together in co-dependency.

To one side of the yard lay the drying shed, a high-ceilinged barn containing rack upon rack of shelves that held the willow once it had been cut into clefts roughly the shape and size of a cricket bat. The clefts looked superficially similar, but judgement of them was the real art of the batmaker. The shaping and pressing of a cricket bat was, for someone as skilled as Chris, not difficult. He could make one in a couple of hours. But each of the clefts drying in the shed was an individual thing. Although they were cut to the same size, they could vary in weight by as much as twenty per cent due to the water content. Clefts cut from the centre of the trunk may have some darker heartwood on them, which some players liked and others didn’t. Some had little marks in the grain called ‘butterflies’ which meant that they had to be downgraded. The grain itself was another issue. Each of the tree’s annual growth rings formed a vertical line along the cleft, a little darker than the rest of the wood. Although the number of grains across the face had no effect on how the bat would perform, there was a fashion for the very highest grades of willow to have the closest and straightest grains from the trees that had grown the slowest.

Aesthetics were a consideration, but the major one was performance. And where aesthetics and performance met lay the rarest clefts of all. These would make the top range bats that retailed for five hundred pounds and more. The first consideration was a cleft that had dried out but retained volume, which would enable Chris to keep the size of the bat imposingly big while reducing the weight, and then there was its density, which would affect how the ball rebounded from its surface.

From the thousands of clefts in the drying shed, Chris may find a couple of hundred each year that he would reserve for the bats used by professional cricketers. These were engineered like racing cars, to perform at the very limits of the willow. Like racing cars, they weren’t suitable for the regular punter, the amateur, because they might break at any moment. Chris took me inside to his workbench and showed me a bat so light and dry it felt like balsa rather than willow. It was an extraordinary thing, but it had split after a few innings by the player that he’d made it for, a part of the spine shearing away and held in place by an elastic band that Chris had wrapped around it while he worked out if it could somehow be saved. 

For bat manufacturers, having their stickers on the bats used by pro players, especially famous internationals, was important for their business. A player making a Test match century may be on screen for almost an entire day holding their product. The company that Chris worked for, Gray-Nicolls, had been producing bats since 1876. In their offices was a letter from WG Grace lamenting the loss of his favourite bat, made by them. But now that cricket had become so big internationally, and specifically in India, where the top players had the same commercial clout as Bollywood film stars and publicised everything from mobile phones to milk, giant sportswear companies had entered the market too. They would pay some of the best players vast sums to use their bats, or at least to have their stickers. It wasn’t because Nike or Adidas thought they could make much money from selling cricket bats – they couldn’t - but because it raised awareness of their training shoe and sneaker brands. In the game, there were always lots of rumours about who really made such-and-such a player’s bats, which were then stickered to the order of his sponsors. It was the batmakers’ grassy knoll.

In 1972, a South African golf club engineer called Arthur Garner, and his business partner, Barrie Wheeler, who designed courses, approached Gray-Nicolls with an idea for a cricket bat based on something that had proven effective in golf, where the backs of a set of irons had been hollowed out. This created a much larger sweet spot on the club face and made them more forgiving for the amateur player. They thought the same theory might work in a bat. John Newbery, who worked with his father Len as a batmaker at Gray-Nicolls, shaped a prototype.

Enter next Robert ‘Swan’ Richards, who was charged with expanding Gray-Nicolls’ Australian operation. He made a Scoop, as the bat would become known [footnote one], and somehow got it into the hands of the Australian captain Ian Chappell, who used it in a Test match against England in the 1974-5 Ashes. Chappell’s dashing younger brother Greg began using one too, and a legend was launched. The atom had been split, imaginations fired. Something old was made new again. Stuart Surridge produced the Jumbo, a sort of anti-Scoop with a lump of extra wood added to the spine, that Viv Richards and Graham Gooch made famous. Duncan Fearnley came up with the Magnum, a fearsome club used by Ian Botham. Newbery created the Excalibur, which had the shoulders shaved off. Dennis Lillee became involved with The ComBat, which was made not of willow at all, but aluminium [footnote two].

The truth was that the Chappells and Viv Richards and Graham Gooch would have been brilliant with whatever bats they used. But the new shapes and designs were objects of fetish, in the same way that guitars or motorcycles were, and they had brought into the light something that had been hidden the folds of the game – the emotional relationship between the batsman and his bat, between man and willow.

Although cricket was a team game, the batsman was essentially alone, ranged against the bowler and ten fielders. In this hostile universe, batsmen had one thing in common: the bat itself. It was more than just a tool of the trade. In a drawer at the workshop, Chris King kept a series of what he called ‘blanks’, which were models of the type of handle that the pro batsmen he made bats for wanted. Each was a study in psyche, some round, some oval, some thick, others slender, some with extra grip points added on or shaved away. They all pointed to the intimacy between object and user.

Around the turn of the millennium, as cricket was about to undergo one of its futuristic shivers with the invention of a new format, Twenty20 cricket, the cricket bat evolved once more. It perhaps began in India, where great batsmen are worshipped almost as living deities, and where a trend for bats that had a flatter face, thicker edges and a deep bow to the blade took off. Indian bats looked somehow broader, more weaponised. Batmakers changed the way that they pressed their bats, reducing the amount of compression to allow them to shape blades with long, sweeping lines, and giant edges. They took weight from the shoulders of the bat and left it further down, rebalancing them. Within a few years the new-look bats had allied with a new mentality among batsmen to launch a revolution in technique and scoring. What had changed was not just the bat, but the psyche of the batsmen holding it.

Like a racing car, the willow had been pushed to its physical limits. There was nothing more a batmaker could do to make it drier or lighter or more efficient. So Chris King had begun to think about something else, a new frontier: how the bat might make its user feel. He’d designed a bat called the Nemesis, which looked like some kind of war hammer, with parts of the spine carved away to allow extra weight in the hitting areas. Sam Billings, a blindingly talented young wicketkeeper batsman at Kent was using it.

I went to see Sam Billings bat against Hampshire at the Ageas Bowl. After lunch, the Hampshire bowlers were Matt Coles and James Tomlinson. Tommo bowled left arm over at sharp pace and was something of a cult hero on the South coast. He’d once taken a legendary catch when he walked out onto the field after the tea interval clutching a banana. He hadn’t realised that play had restarted and when he looked up, the ball was flying straight at him on the boundary. He caught it in one hand while holding onto the banana in the other. Coles was brawny all-rounder who had once played for Kent and enjoyed what his profile on the cricinfo website called ‘a roistering reputation’.

Tommo had grown a large hipster beard that he was refusing to shave off until the end of the season. He bowled rapidly, the beard jutting before him as he ran in. He looked like a ship’s figurehead. Billings attacked him relentlessly. Coles was being barracked good-naturedly by both sets of supporters, and he started firing down some short stuff at Billings, who responded with a series of brutal pull shots. We were sitting side-on to the wicket, which is always where the bowling appears at its fastest, and Billings was hitting his pull almost from the front foot, weight going at the ball, whipping it off his nose with a flourish of the Nemesis in an exhibition of pure nerve and skill.

The Nemesis was a kind of thought experiment. As Chris put it, ‘fast cars look fast,’ and the Nemesis was designed to look like something that would smash a cricket ball into small pieces. It was too extreme to catch the wider imagination in the way that the Scoop had. Such was the nostalgic power of that bat, Gray-Nicolls were able to bring it back for successive generations. Brian Lara made his World record Test match and First-Class scores of 375 and 501 not out with a Scoop in 1994, two decades after the bat’s first heyday, and in 2017, Chris came up with a beautiful new iteration that Kraigg Brathwaite opened the batting with for West Indies at Lord’s [footnote three].

The future, Chris was sure, lay in this direction where Salix Alba exerted its hold not just on the physical game, but the one that lived in the memory and in the mind, the wood that makes the bats.

Footnote one: The Scoop’s official name was the GN-100. Gray-Nicolls followed it with the GN-500, which had four smaller scoops out of the back and was used by David Gower (who else), and the Power Spot, all of which retain their place in the hearts of bat nostalgics.

Footnote two: Lillee used the ComBat to infamous effect in a Test match against England at Perth in 1979. His first blow went down the ground for three runs with a dreadful metallic clank. Greg Chappell, Australia’s captain, thought it should have been four and ordered the twelfth man to take out a regular bat for Lillee. At the same moment, Mike Brearley, England’s captain, complained to the umpires that the ComBat had damaged the ball. The umpires told Lillee to change the bat. He refused, and the standoff lasted for ten minutes until Lillee gave up and hurled the ComBat away somewhere over extra cover. Sales of the ComBat, in which Lillee had a small stake, briefly soared, but then the Laws of the game were amended to specify that the blade of the bat must be made of wood. I used a ComBat once in the nets. It just sounded wrong, and you can’t mess with the sound of the game.

Footnote three: That bat featured in another record too, albeit when Brathwaite was bowled by Jimmy Anderson in West Indies’ second innings to become Anderson’s 500th Test wicket, the first Englishman to reach the mark.

Out now, fight fans…