Paras Anand only needs to feel the bat to tell the difference. No hammer needed. Just the bat in his hand and the eye that has been looking at willow for nearly three decades. Whether or not it will ping — the speed at which the leather ball flies after hitting the bat.
A few kilometres away, Jatin Sareen says, “I catch it with my eye. Day and night, this is my job. I know which will ping and which will not.”
Two men, two factories — SG and SS — and one city. Meerut has been making cricket bats for years before Twenty20 cricket existed. The willow with which Sunil Gavaskar, Sachin Tendulkar and Virat Kohli broke world records, Virender Sehwag scored a triple hundred, VVS Laxman hit an iconic 281 at Eden Gardens and Yuvraj Singh scored six sixes. And the bats that Rohit Sharma and Suryakumar Yadav carried to the ground when India won the World Cups. They are all Made in Meerut, shaped by hands that understand a batsman’s needs sometimes before the batsman does.
The distress call
A month before the T20 World Cup at home, Sanju Samson called Paras. Like a rally driver consulting his chief mechanic before a race, Samson trusted one man to solve what no one else could.
Three of his bats had cracked in the nets. The balance was right, the weight was right, the feel was right, but they kept breaking. Samson, who would eventually be named Player of the Tournament, was worried about having no match bat left.
“Sanju said everything is alright, like balance and weight, but the bats were breaking,” Paras says. “I told him, I am giving you soft wood for rebound (energy transfer to the ball), which is what you wanted. I told him to make sure the bats have face-tape to protect them from breaking.”
Chennai Super Kings’ Sanju Samson plays a shot during the Indian Premier League 2026 match against Mumbai Indians at Wankhede Stadium, in Mumbai on Thursday. (ANI Photo)
The face tape is a rudimentary hack club cricketers learn early. It makes the blade sturdy and less brittle without adding to its weight. One of the world’s most destructive T20 batsmen had forgotten to do it. Paras does not say this with any irritation. The relationship between bat maker and batsman is this close and the bat maker’s job is to solve the problem without making the batsman feel it was his fault.
“You need to figure out what will work for him without tampering with anything that is already working such as the balance, weight of the bat. This is how closely we work with cricketers,” he says.
Paras has a six-member team at Sanspareils Greenlands — SG, to the cricketing world — whose job is to liaison with the star players. He refers to urgent calls from batsmen as “distress calls”. Sunil Gavaskar once made those calls to Paras’s uncle and so did Mohammad Azharuddin. Rahul Dravid made them to Paras. “And in the future maybe Ayush Mhatre,” he says. These days, his son deals with younger cricketers. The line of succession runs straight. What changes is only who is at the crease.
The sword, the curve, the weight
Dravid arrived at SG through Azharuddin. The Karnataka batsman had never played with a bat weighing less than 1,170-1,180 gm. Azharuddin used an SG bat at 1,120 gm — lighter, quicker. “Dravid asked Azhar to speak to SG and he too started using the lighter bat,” Paras says.
The result was a batsman whose defining quality was timing without force. “Dravid’s strength was that at whatever pace the bowler bowled, he was able to get his bat there.”
Ishan Kishan, the wicketkeeper-batsman, who batted at No. 3 in India’s T20 World Cup-winning campaign, also uses a lightweight bat — 1,125 gm. But for a different reason. “He uses the bat like a sword,” Paras says. The cut, the pull, the inside-out shot, all played with quick bat speed, movement over mass.
Hardik Pandya wants something else: the bat to curve. Eighty per cent of Pandya’s bat has a bow — a pronounced arc in the blade that most bat makers would consider extreme. Sachin Tendulkar was among the first to notice that as wood compresses under repeated hitting, it forms a sweet spot at the curve. He asked bat makers to think differently. Pandya heard what the wood was saying and went further.
Hardik Pandya of Mumbai Indians plays a shot in an Indian Premier League match against Gujarat Titans at Narendra Modi Stadium, Ahmedabad. (Photo: Arjun Singh / CREIMAS for IPL)
SG has engineered a willow with 200 per cent more curve than what rival manufacturers produce. The physics argument is simple: a curved bat increases the chances of the ball making a clean parabola into the sky. Pandya wants to hit a six from every part of the bat, and he wants it arching upward at roughly 45 degrees. “You cannot do that by just making a standard bat,” Paras says.
The bow in Rishabh Pant’s bat is not extreme like Pandya’s. The bow is present lower down on the bat, similar to KL Rahul’s. “For me, the first thing is the balance and the second thing is the punch of the bat,” Pant says in a video.
Watching bat, not the match
Before the T20 World Cup, Shivam Dube came to the SS factory. “I requested him to use a bat that’s 30 gm heavier,” Sareen says. “Because he has been coming down the order and the team needs him to hit big sixes. And he did very well.”
This is what Sareen does for Dhoni too. Dhoni uses a 1,220-gm bat through most of his innings. In the slog overs, he switches to one 30 gm heavier. The extra mass arrives exactly when the bowlers are trying to bowl fast, full and straight.
SS’s Jatin Sareen with a young MS Dhoni during the cricketer’s visit to the bat-making unit in Meerut. (Photo by special arrangement)
“Any guy scoring big sixes, his bat will be heavy. Nobody can hit big sixes with a light bat,” Sareen says.
The big West Indians — Kieron Pollard, Andre Russell — used 1,250-gm bats. Tendulkar over 1,300 gm. Gayle too. Suryakumar Yadav’s bat is 1,170 gm, Rohit Sharma’s is 10 gm heavier and so is Abhishek Sharma’s, Kohli’s is around 1,175, Tilak Varma’s a lighter 1,140.
Sareen carries these numbers in his head the way a tailor carries measurements — not as data but as people. He speaks about his players the way a chef might speak about regulars who influenced how he cooks.
Sourav Ganguly sharpened his skill for making bats. “He used to create something extraordinary for himself. And he used to carry two kit bags of bats,” he says.
Virat Kohli of Royal Challengers Bengaluru celebrates after scoring a fifty during Match 1 of the TATA Indian Premier League 2026 between Royal Challengers Bengaluru and Sunrisers Hyderabad at M. Chinnaswamy Stadium, Bengaluru, India, on March 28, 2026. (CREIMAS for IPL)
Kohli is a genius because of how well he knows what he is holding. Dhoni, “very smart”, asks for the fewest bats. “Dhoni has the best key to the lock. He knows what he needs and how he needs it.”
When Sareen watches cricket — which is rarely, because he is always working — he is not watching the match. He is watching the bat. Which player is using which one, whether it’s new or old. He can tell from the shot whether the bat is working. He can sometimes tell from the shot which bat it is. “I just see what bat my player is using. Is it a new bat or old bat? And I understand from his game which bat he is using and which bat is getting the performance.”
The look of confidence
Suryakumar Yadav’s bat has less to do with weight or curve. He likes wide grain — the straight lines on the piece of wood that is attached to the bat handle. He likes his willow to have a slight shade of red. “Surya likes a bit of wide grain and a lot of red colour on the bat. He loves that look,” Sareen says. “And though grains don’t play a very vital role, it helps with the ping. Surya’s is a very well-balanced bat with equal distribution of weight and the middle is really big.”
The look of the bat matters. This is not vanity. This is confidence. A batsman who walks to the crease believing in what he is holding arrives in a different state of mind from one who doesn’t. “It is also about the batsman’s confidence in his bat maker,” Paras says.
The humidifier room
The SG factory has a humidifier room. Unfinished bats stand in rows on stands, toes upward, breathing in the humidity.
Moisture is everything. Too dry and the performance suffers. Too wet and the bat grows heavy. They are currently running experiments on the relationship between the density of the wood, the compression, and the rebound of the ball off the blade. Every dimension of what makes a bat perform — the mass that powers the shot, the ideal pressure to achieve the right rebound, the correlation between the handle’s curve and the blade’s — is being worked through.
“Eventually, we will come up with a formula,” Paras says. The ping is still tested by hitting the bat with wood. This test has no digital equivalent. Computer numerical control machines produce the dimensions of a bat handle with precision. The hammer confirms the soul.
“It is not just the person who is actually giving the shape to the bat, but everybody is involved,” Paras says. “The person choosing the handle, the person choosing the cleft, the person fixing the handle, the person compressing the wood, the person sanding the bat. Even in sanding there is a risk of variability. The player may want an edge of 41 mm so sanding has to be done manually.”
Hundreds of hands, each with a small role, each indispensable. All of them in the service of one moment: a batsman’s bat making contact with the ball, and two men in Meerut watching. Or not watching — because they already know, before the commentators say it, whether or not the bat was right.
The night everything changed
Jatin Sareen joined the family business at Sareen Sports Industries — SS — in 1996, went to England to study bat-making, and spent his first years learning from his father, a university cricketer who understood willow from the inside. For most of those early years, a cricket bat was still a cricket bat. Heavier than a tennis racquet and shaped to hit the ball. The specifications were relatively simple. The conversations were shorter.
Then came 2007. The first T20 World Cup in South Africa. Sareen imported a special lot of willow from England. He made six to eight bats for Yuvraj Singh. The blade was half an inch longer than standard. The middle was generous.
Then Yuvraj hit Stuart Broad for six sixes in an over and everything changed.”The bats became bigger, stronger, more crisper in those times,” Sareen says.
In his office, those bats are still on display. The special willow, however, is with Yuvraj. But the exact prototype is in Sareen’s showcase. Yuvraj, in his heyday, was a marketing man’s dream. “Yuvraj is the man who created the six-hitting sensation in India,” Sareen says. “He was the best bat seller. Everybody still follows his trend.”
That ‘six sixes’ over reset Meerut. Every distress call that followed, every gram that’s debated — the line runs back to that night in Durban. The conversations got longer. The specifications got more particular. The relationship between bat maker and batsman became something closer to what it is now: two people solving the same problem, from either end of the willow.
The perfect 10
Paras says his goal is to deliver a perfect 10 — a bat that perfectly matches the player’s requirements. “Sometimes you give them a 9, sometimes a 9-and-a-half. But most times you reach it. When you actually give them a 10, it has a massive impact.”
The bat makes no sound in the making. Only when the ball finds the sweet spot, in a stadium somewhere, under lights, does the willow speak.