Mongoose do make a wide variety of cricket bats. Many of them are of the conventional type, with a traditional size handle and a traditional size blade but the most recognizable and famous Mongoose cricket bat is the long handle and shorter blade cricket bat.
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This bat was unveiled with the advent of T20 cricket and was used to good effect by players like Matthew Hayden during the IPL. The hype around the bat seemed to fizzle though as players both professional and amateur opted for the more traditional type of bat.
The thinking behind the bat was sound. The bat gave batsmen more of a golf club type of effect when hitting the ball. The batsmen with such a short blade and longer handle would be able to generate a massive amount of bat speed that could not be generated with a normal bat.
As these Mongoose cricket bats first emerged on the market, many raised their eyebrows and wondered whether the ICC or the MCC would outlaw them. It however turns out that these bats are 100% perfectly legal. The shorter blade was also advertised to cut out dead spots in the bat, like the splice and the toe. The mongoose cricket bat was thus a smaller blade but the same amount of sweet spot as a regular cricket bat.
Why the Mongoose revolutionary bat did not make a huge indent in the T20 market could be for multiple reason. Anything from feeling unconventional in the hand, to diminishing the amount of control the batsman has over his strokeplay.
No matter the marketing or technical prowess of the Mongoose short blade cricket bat, it will most certainly go down in the annals of cricket history as one of the strangest cricket bats to have ever graced the great game.
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