India’s World Cup winning captain MS Dhoni has special advice for star players like Hardik Pandya and Rishabh Pant.
Pant has come under immense criticism on social media for his inconsistent show with the bat and the wicketkeeper-batter reached out to Dhoni for advice on getting more consistent, according to a report in Times of India.
Special bats
"Dhoni told him to try the round-bottomed bat. He is slowly getting used to it. The curve on his bat is not as pronounced yet. But he can feel some difference," a source said.
This is evident from the fact that both Pant and Hardik are now using bats with pronounced curves at the bottom.
Hardik and Pant have Sanspareils Greenlands (SG) as their bat manufacturer, who has been told to produce round-bottom bats to improve their batting in the shortest format.
Paras Anand, the Managing Director (MD) of SG, told TOI: "It was MS Dhoni who had first started using this kind of bat before the 2019 World Cup. And now these Indian players have started asking for this kind of bat."
Effective shot-making
Elaborating further on how round-bottom bats help cricketers increase their range of hitting, Anand said: "The players claim that it helps them access all directions of the ground while shot-making. A bat with a flat bottom prompts a relatively closed stance whereas the round-bottomed bat enables them to have a more open stance that helps them to manoeuvre the bat easily from the word go. If one shaves the bottom and makes it round, the bat has a thicker base and has more meat at the bottom."
