Fri. Mar 29th, 2024
MS Dhoni

According to new rules which are to be issued on October 1, the thick part of the bats will now be limited to a maximum width of 40mm. This rule will come under the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) guidelines issued in March this year. This means that all the big hitters like Davis Warner, West Indies star hitter Chris Gayle and former Indian Captain MS Dhoni will have to change their bats.

Players like Warner, Dhoni, Gayle and Pollard have been using 50mm (45mm in the case of Dhoni) thick edges bat which allowed them to hit big shots easily. However, Pollard has already switched to a bat under 40mm limit during the IPL and said that it “made no sense” to wait until October.

Indian skipper Virat Kohli is already using a bat that qualifies to the new specifications. Similarly,  South Africa’s AB de Villiers, Australia’s Steve Smith and England’s Joe Root are also using bats with edges that are less than 40mm and hence won’t need to change their bats. Apart from Dhoni, almost all the batsmen use bats within the 40mm limit.

Also, it is learnt that Dhoni uses the heaviest bat in the team with a total weight between 1250gm to 1300gm with a 12-inch sweet spot. While Kohli’s bat is much lighter, weighing around 1160 gm with an eight-inch sweet spot.

Along with the 40mm edge thickness limit, bat dimensions will also be limited to 108mm in width and 67mm in depth.

By Naman