7/4/2023 0 Comments Strength scoop![]() ![]() He had this invention and everybody knocked it back but Grays took it and it does work scientifically.” From a wafer-thin prototype crafted by John Newbery grew a cricket phenomenon.Īt that point Gray Nicolls’ main competition came from bat brands like SP sports, Duncan Fearnley and Stuart Surridge, whose Viv Richards-endorsed “Jumbo” was the only bat to really compare with the Scoop in the popularity stakes. It proved to be money well spent.įorty years later, Swan Richards has particularly fond recollections of Wheeler and the seemingly-crazy idea that propelled the Gray Nicolls brand to unprecedented levels of success and an unimpeachable place in the hearts of cricket nostalgists. The Scoop was a bold re-imagination of conventional bat designs of the times and Gray Nicolls picked up on the idea immediately, agreeing to pay Garner and Wheeler royalties on account of their 18-year patent, which expired in 1990. The concept owed more to golf club design than cricket and the pair’s early advances were rebuffed by a host of other manufacturers. It was during that period, in 1972, that South African golf club engineer Arthur Garner and Cambridge-based golf course designer Barrie Wheeler approached the Gray family with the original idea for a scooped-back bat with perimeter-weighted edges. Swan Richards was right on the spot in 1971 when he took an 18-month crash course in bat-making at Robertsbridge under the master bat craftsmen Len Newbery (“a genius man he was,” says Richards with fondness undimmed by the passing decades) and his son John, then partners in the Gray Nicolls business. ![]() ![]() The company’s roots trace back almost 160 years, when early examples of their bats were used by the likes of WG Grace.Īrriving at the conclusion that cricket’s future would benefit from a splash of colour, Gray Nicolls had pioneered bright red sticker designs in the early 70s, long before the game itself was jolted out of its sepia-toned complacency by World Series Cricket. The precise details of the Scoop’s invention have always been a little scarce, which seems odd given that cricket’s most famous and fondly-recalled bat was hatched in its most famed production house of bats the original Gray Nicolls factory in Robertsbridge, Sussex. ![]() “There’s a lot of myths about all this,” says Richards as he casts his eyes over match-used Scoops wielded by the likes of the Chappells, Clive Lloyd, Gordon Greenidge and Lawrence Rowe, all crafted by with his own hands in Gray Nicolls’ first Australian factory in Mordialloc, south of Melbourne. Soon Chappell’s brother Greg followed suit and many more Australians, catapulting one of cricket’s most novel innovations into the realm of fetish object for cricketers around the world. Ian Chappell put that one to work during the 1974-75 home Ashes series in Australia. I explain to Richards that the Gray Nicolls Scoop is currently celebrating its 40th birthday but Swan, nicknamed thus on account of an “elegant” string of eight successive ducks during his time as a club cricketer for Glenelg in Adelaide, needs no prompting to recall the time in 1974 that he himself crafted the first example of the famous bat used in international cricket. Photograph: Courtesy of Swan Richards Photograph: Courtesy of Swan Richards Original Gray Nicolls Scoop drawings by John Newbery. ![]()
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