Kit Week: Lillee's metal blade, Lance's Excalibur

The cricket bat has evolved in many ways over the years. Here are some of the innovations that didn't quite stick. 

Read part two: Carbon-graphite super bats, DRS-defying tape

 

Kit Week: Aussie greats and their bats through time

Dennis Lillee's aluminium bat (1979)

The genesis of perhaps the most controversial – certainly the most memorable – bat innovation of the past 50 years was American baseball.

Having entered into a business partnership with Perth grade cricketer Graham Monoghan in the wake of the World Series Cricket reconciliation in 1979, Dennis Lillee's immediate business focus was the establishment of indoor cricket centres on Australia's west and east coasts.

But when that devolved into week-long school coaching clinics held largely indoors, Monoghan's search for cheaper, more accessible items of cricket kit led him to design a metallic option based on the growth of aluminium bats in American amateur baseball in the 1970s.

The significant difference being Monoghan's crude prototype was fashioned from a section of aluminium staircase to which a handle was welded and a rubber grip fitted. 

When Lillee tried it one of the pair's indoor centres, he was pleasantly surprised at the way balls pinged from the lightweight surface.

Local metal manufacturer Comalco was then enlisted to design a mould through which the aluminium could be extruded, thereby refining the design and production processes.

Word spread about the new venture and the entrepreneurial pair were approached by UK bat companies who offered licence fees and ongoing royalties. 

However, having come up with the idea, the WA-based duo felt it only right they retain control of the potentially lucrative industry and opted to go it alone.

"The bat was not designed, or made for first-class cricket," Lillee wrote in his 2003 autobiography.

"At half the price of a willow bat, we thought it would be useful for schools cricket, nets and under-developed countries."

If Lillee had learned anything from his two years with Kerry Packer's breakaway troupe, it was the importance of marketing. 

And he saw no better opportunity to promote the revolutionary bat than by using it in a Test match, having checked that nowhere in cricket's laws did it stipulate bats must be made from willow. 

Or any form of timber, for that matter.

In the opening Test of the 1979-80 home summer – a curious schedule of alternate matches featuring West Indies and England to celebrate the game's reunification in Australia – Lillee faced up to the unsuspecting Caribbean quicks at the Gabba, but was barely able to lay aluminium bat on ball.

The one defensive stroke he did accomplish in compiling a seven-ball duck yielded such a high-pitched ping the bowler (Joel Garner) stared in disbelief, while short-leg fielder Desmond Haynes collapsed into paroxysms of laughter. 

Other than being intrigued and amused, the West Indies signalled no concerns about the novelty bat but that was not the case a week later when Australia took on England in Perth.

The Western Australian Cricket Association politely asked Lillee not to use the bat in the Test, while acknowledging it did not have the wherewithal to prevent it but the fiery quick forged ahead. 

He even lent it to his skipper Greg Chappell to trial in the nets prior to the match, but Chappell was unimpressed by its performance and sceptical as to its merit.

Lillee went to the wicket late on day one with Australia struggling at 7-219, and remained unbeaten on 11 at stumps albeit using a traditional willow bat. 

Upon resuming next morning, Lillee's switch to the aluminium alternative was announced with a resounding 'clang' as he drove Ian Botham through mid-off.

England captain Mike Brearley immediately examined the near-new ball and complained to umpires it had been damaged by the powder-coated metallic bat.

As the legality and morality of its use was debated by umpires Max O'Connell and Don Weser, Australia's 12th man Rodney Hogg was dispatched by Chappell to supply Lillee with a wooden replacement.

Lillee refused the substitute, instead claiming he had a preferred willow bat in his kit bag and theatrically stalked off to the dressing room where he his close mate Rod Marsh mischievously muttered ''are you going to let them tell you that, when it’s not against the laws?'. 

Lillee duly took the bait, and returned to the middle defiantly wielding the aluminium version which prompted a further round of crisis talks.

Following a delay of almost 10 minutes, Chappell pulled rank by taking a traditional bat and a clear message out to his recalcitrant fast bowler who was being egged on by his partisan home crowd.

"Then I knew I was in trouble," Lillee recalled at the sight of his clearly unimpressed captain stalking through the players' gate.

In a final act of defiance, Lillee hurled the controversial blade over the head of his advancing skipper "hoping to make him jump", with the abandoned bat coming to rest on the WACA outfield. 

It was the last time an aluminium bat was seen in the first-class cricket arena.

Within weeks, laws were changed to mandate bat blades "shall consist solely of wood" despite any definitive evidence the metal caused more damage to a leather ball than its willow counterparts.

Sensing the game was up for his venture, Lillee had all players from the Ashes rivals sign the offending item with Brearley noting cheekily 'good luck with the sales'.

While the episode's publicity was more than Lillee could have hoped, sales stopped to virtually zero the moment aluminium bats were outlawed and all the pair had to show for their vision was a collection of curiosities and a stockpile of extruded metal.

Which was ultimately sold for scrap, at a return of roughly once cent in the dollar.

Lance Cairns's Excalibur (1983)

Australia were well aware of the explosive threat posed by New Zealand all-rounder Lance Cairns and his intimidating club-like bat well before he took strike on a sunny Sunday afternoon, in the second final of 1982-83's one-day tri-series tournament at the MCG.

Less than a year earlier, Cairns had memorably helped lift the Kiwis to just their second Test win over their trans-Tasman neighbours when elevated in the batting order to settle skittish nerves in the home team's Eden Park dressing room.

On that occasion, NZ faced a notional fourth innings chase of 104 for an historic win but had stumbled to 3-44 against an attack of Dennis Lillee, Jeff Thomson, Terry Alderman and Bruce Yardley.

Cairns was lifted from his regular number eight to five in the batting order to stem the carnage by inflicting a measure of his own, and he duly bludgeoned 34 from 21 balls to ice the victory.

Eleven months later, circumstances were vastly different – Australia followed their win in the opening game of the best-of-three finals series with a then-record MCG one-day total of 8-302, with NZ a shambolic 6-44 in reply.

But the weapon Cairns wielded as he lumbered to the middle was formidably familiar.

Like many an innovation, the strangely primitive-looking 'Excalibur' was designed essentially by accident.

Former NZ Test batter John Guy, who post-retirement had owned sporting goods stores before taking up a role with British bat manufacturer Newbery, noticed one of the brand's bats that showed a 'dry knot' in the wood near the blade's shoulder.

The knot indicated a potential weak spot in the willow, and Guy casually inquired of the company's eponymous bat maker John Newbery what would likely be the result if a ball struck the imperfection.

Newbery agreed with Guy's supposition the bat would likely split, and added it was possible the shoulder would break off completely.

"I said, 'What if we shave it?' So that's what we did," Guy told ESPN-Cricinfo in 2015.

"We shaved the shoulder down and I said, 'I think that's a good idea for a bat'. 

"Newbery said: 'What would you call it? It's got to be something like a sword'. 

"I said it felt like a heavy wand. He said, 'What about King Arthur … Excalibur'."

As a Newbery contracted player, Cairns had first unsheathed 'Excalibur' – which resembled a hybrid of a club and a baseball bat, or even a truncated oar – to frightening effect for Otago in a 1980 domestic first-class game where Wellington had reduced his team to 7-42.

With less than half an hour remaining in the day's play, the broad-shouldered seamer decided attack was the best form of defence and he went to stumps unbeaten on 68 having used his equally unconventional bat to rain sixes on to the grandstand roof at Hutt Recreation Ground.

The number eight reached his century next morning, the milestone arriving off 45 balls faced, and it was that same 'death or glory' mindset – as well as the same assault weapon – he took to the sun-soaked MCG years later.

In barely 30 minutes of unrestrained belligerence, Cairns swung his odd-shaped bat like an axe and landed six blows in the crowd in the days before boundary ropes significantly reduced the ground's expansive playing field.

He pummelled 52 from 25 balls, leaving many to wonder what enigmas his mysterious Excalibur contained.

The question seemed pertinent in the wake of his fifth six, an extraordinary heave against Lillee during which Cairns's bottom hand came free from the bat handle yet the ball sailed beyond the distant fine leg fence and landed ten rows back among the punters.

When Cairns somehow lifted a yorker-length ball from Lillee over the long-off fence soon after – a shot that resembled a hockey flick given his high grip on the elongated handle – Ian Chappell could barely contain his incredulity in the commentary box.

"That must be an incredible bat he’s got. It must be made of extremely good English willow,” Chappell observed.

At which point his co-commentator, former England fast bowler Frank Tyson, added: "Very heavy English willow. And there goes Excalibur into action again."

But while the bat was indisputably heavy as per Cairns's preference, the weight of wood it featured was but part of the secret that extended beyond the blade.

"It was such a big bloody bat, the edges were so thick and there was so much wood in it that I had no chance of doing any damage to it," Cairns told the Sydney Morning Herald decades later.

"One of the different things about it was instead of the cane being a certain size in the handle, it was a hell of a lot smaller, and it had this rubbery compound compressed around it.

"Which gave the handle quite a bit of a whip, and in those days I wasn't a bad sort of a golfer, so I think a lot of my batting was a bit of a golf swing."

As testament to Cairns's golf swing, he once reputedly won a longest-drive competition at a course in Dunedin which he saw taking place while driving home from his job at a nearby fertiliser plant, and participated in while wearing his work-issue gum boots and wielding a borrowed driver.

But it was not only the magic properties of 'Excalibur' – which Guy later conceded was simply a marketing ploy with the shaved shoulders providing no discernible difference to the bat's performance – that propelled Cairns in his remarkable innings.

Just as crucial was the bouncer he received from Lillee early in his innings, to which Cairns took exception as a number eight batter in the days when tailenders were supposed to be exempt from short-pitched bowling.

"One of the first balls I faced was from bloody Lillee and it was a bouncer," he recalled years later.

"I turned round to Marshy (Australia wicketkeeper Rod Marsh) and I said 'what the bloody hell is he doing?’ and he says 'nah, you’ll be okay'.

"So I went down to Wally (batting partner Warren Lees) and I said 'stuff this, in or out'. 

"I decided I was going to go for it."

^{First published September 12, 2022}