So, there's now a newer version of the cricket bat available, called the Mongoose. Meant to be better for big hitting, it is a bat with a longer handle and smaller blade. No, it is not a fly swatter. It is, in fact, something that takes all the cricketing figures of speech about aggressive batting - 'using the long handle', the batsmen treating bowlers like flies and swatting them away and so on - a little too seriously.

There have been plenty of innovations with bats in recent times, which might leave the bowlers feeling a bit left out, which is ok since it is their natural state of being anyway in modern cricket.

But, still, why not try a few innovations with the ball?

How about a ball that is built with a significantly heavier side to aide swing? No need to bother with all the sweat, dirt and lozenge.

Maybe someone should build the 'Soft Spot'. A ball with a random part which is soft and spongy, so as to provide random uneven bounce and no one knows when it will come. It will be like a Russian roulette, and as such, comes with a readymade tagline/marketing campaign.

Or perhaps we could have a ball with a GPRS chip integrated into it, programmed to spot and hone in towards the stumps. So to bowl in the corridor of uncertainty, you have to actually try and bowl really wide outside the off stump. This is precisely the sort of thing that will resurrect Steve Harmisson's career.

I am, of course, being sarcastic at this point but there may be a few cricket goods manufacturers who may be taking this quite seriously. Or more likely, they may be saying 'Oh we've already tried that'.

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