Review rated by 5 Ciao members on average: helpful
I bought my little beast cricket bat about six months back from a local cricket retailer and I was very disappointed with the result. I had heard great things about this bat but it didn't live up to my expectation.
**First Impression**
To be honest, my first impressions of the bat were very positive, just based on purely looking at the willow and feeling it. The bat had 9 ruler straight grains (exactly what I had been looking for), the bat had a strip of heartwood down the side, which I initially wasn't a fan of when it first came out, but gradually it grew on me, so by the time I bought the bat, this didn't worry me/
**Preparing the bat**
I knocked the bat in for approximately 7-8 hours and it was doing this process that I started to appreciate that that the bat may not be quite what I was looking for. the middle sounded as peach, just as Kookas usually does, but the middle was slightly too low for my liking and the sound of the toe and higher up on the bat was dreadful. Basically, anything other than the middle sounded poor.
**First throws**
I got my first throws with my new bat a few weeks after I purchased it, and I realized then, that this bat, simply wasn't the one for me! It felt far too bottom heavy, for me ( a genuine touch player) and as my first impressions were, the middle was sweet but everything else was pretty rubbish
i tried to continue with the bat for as long as I could, but I just knew it wasn't for me. As a player you have to have confidence in the bat you use, and I just didn't have that in this bat. My form dropped and I knew that I had to get a new bat - what is more, the bat revealed some surface cracks and some cracks to the edges, just a few months after I had fully prepared it - very disappointing!
**Where is it now?**
I have not totally got rid of this bat, I now use it as a fielding bat, having cut it down, which is ideal through its good middle.
**My advice**
I am not saying don't purchase this bat because I know that many people have had success with the bat and have like the quality of it. the bottom line is, that this bat did not suit me or my game!
06.09.2008 21:45
Shame it let you down xx