Frequently Asked Questions

What wood do you make your cricket bats with?

We make our cricket bats exclusively with English Willow. While the handle is made from cane which we get produced in India, the blade of all of our cricket bats is made only from English Willow. It's very common now for brands to use Kashmir willow, Serbian Willow, Dutch willow, and occasionally Australian willow. This partly due to the cost and availability of English Willow, and partly due to new marketing techniques that can be adopted since the rise of social media. What many fail to account for, is that these willows have been tried and tested in years gone by, and have not stood the test of time, thus increasing the global demand for English willow. 

The UK offers the perfect climate and soil types for English cricket bat willow to flourish. English willow requires moist, low laying, loamy soil, most commonly found in the South East of England. This is true to the point that some bat makers avoid willow that is grown in the more mountainous north of England due to the impact the growing conditions will have on the cleft that is produced. The same rationale is provided to other types of willow such as Kashmir. Kashmir is much warmer, drier climate, resulting in a firmer, less springy cricket bat. Though there is no scientific evidence to back this up, there is a reason that a professional cricketer will only trust their reputation with an English willow cricket bat.

As for English willow, the timber itself possesses 'softwood' properties while actually being categorised as a 'hardwood'. This makes a cricket bat tough, yet lightweight, and when pressed correctly, does not shatter easily. 

 

Do you hard press or soft press your cricket bats?

We believe that a bat is either pressed, or unpressed. A cricket ball, especially a new or newer ball will leave seam marks or even large indentations in a bat that is under pressed. The truth is that no 2 clefts are the same, and we aim to maximise the playing potential of every bat that we make. We know the sound and response that the modern cricketer is looking for in their cricket bat, and we have adopted our own methods of pressing that we believe gives every cleft the optimum chance of being that super bat that our customer is looking for. In summary, some clefts could have many passes through the press, to the point somewhere an observer may worry that the bat would become too hard, thus being 'over-pressed'. However, upon testing the bat with a mallet or ball, it still produces that soft sound that cricketers crave. In the same breath, some clefts reach this point with many less runs through the press, and some clefts never reach this point at all. This is the beauty of working with a natural product. To negate this, every bat that can be purchased on our website is listed with a 'ping test' video, showing the customer how the bat performs. As for custom made bats, if they don't make the grade, we don't send them, we start again.