Caring For Your Bat
Caring For and Maintaining Your Bat
Cricket bats tend to have a fairly short life but with a little effort and care you should be able to ensure that junior bats are outgrown rather than being replaced through wear and tear.
Knocking In
Don’t take your brand new bat into a match against a new hard ball the first time you use it. Whatever type of willow it is, the chances are that you will damage the surface and it may split or even break against a new ball.
Use a knocking in mallet to condition your bat before use
- When you buy a bat – find out if it is supplied knocked in or pre-knocked in. Most suppliers will knock in a bat for you – for a small charge – it’s a noisy and tiring job. Knocking in means compressing the fibres on the bat to prepare them for use against a hard cricket ball. You do this using a proper knocking in mallet or you can make your own from a bit of wood and a soft old cricket ball.
- Knocking in takes a long time to do (around six to ten hours) and a careful approach – best done by an adult and in short sessions! Only knock in the face, don’t strike the bat too hard at first, deflect the mallet off the face edges to round them but never strike the edges directly as this will weaken the bat.
Eventually you can hit the bat as hard as a cricket ball would playing a shot (and that’s quite hard) there are lots of useful resources on the Internet that can help you or you can ask one of the coaches and we’ll show you how it’s done.
After knocking in – use the bat in the nets with an old ball before using it against a new harder ball. If you can see marks from the seam of the ball – it needs more knocking in.
