Cricket Equipment Guide: Buying Gear in India
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There are two ways to buy cricket equipment in India. One is to walk into a shop in Meerut or Jalandhar, or the sports market in your own city, pick up eight bats, tap each one with a mallet, and buy the one that sounds right. The other is to order online from a photograph and hope.
The first method is better, and it is worth understanding why. Cricket bats are made from a natural material whose density varies cleft to cleft. Two bats from the same maker, the same grade and the same weight will not play the same. This is not marketing; it is wood. Everything else in a cricket bag — pads, gloves, a helmet, a ball — is a manufactured product where the specification tells you most of what you need. The bat is the one item where you have to handle it.
This guide covers what to buy, what the laws actually require, what is optional, and where the equipment in an Indian kit bag comes from.
The bat: which willow, and why it matters
Cricket bats are made from willow, and in India you will be offered two kinds.
English willow is the wood used at every serious level of the game. It is lighter for its volume, softer, and compresses under impact, which is what produces the rebound off the middle. It also needs preparation and care: oiling, knocking in, and a run of gentle use before it is asked to face a hard new ball. It is more expensive, and it does not last as long, because softer wood breaks.
Kashmir willow comes from willow grown in the Kashmir Valley, principally around Anantnag, Pulwama and Baramulla, at altitudes where cold winters and warm summers give the tree a distinct growing cycle. The wood is harder, denser, heavier and carries more moisture. A Kashmir willow bat has a darker face and much more visible grain, a smaller effective middle, and a higher centre of gravity. It is markedly cheaper, it needs far less preparation, and it survives abuse — including synthetic and matting surfaces — for seasons after an English willow bat would have gone.
The sensible rule is unglamorous. If you are playing school cricket, occasional weekend cricket, or cricket on rough or artificial surfaces, buy Kashmir willow and spend the difference on pads and a helmet. If you are playing league cricket with a hard leather ball against bowlers who can hurt you, buy English willow, buy the lowest grade you can afford from a maker you trust, and prepare it properly. Grade numbers describe the cosmetic appearance of the face — straightness and number of grains, absence of blemishes — far more than they describe how the bat will play.
What the laws allow
Bat size is not unlimited. Law 5 caps the overall length at 38 inches, roughly 96.5 cm, and the width of the blade at 4.25 inches, about 10.8 cm. Those limits are old. What is newer is the restriction on the third dimension: since October 2017 the blade's depth may not exceed 67 mm and the edges may not exceed 40 mm, with umpires in the professional game carrying a bat gauge the bat must pass through.
The change came from a recommendation by the MCC's world cricket committee in 2016 — a body that then included Sourav Ganguly, Ricky Ponting and Kumar Sangakkara — after a decade in which edges had grown thicker with no law restraining them at all. Recreational cricket was given a moratorium, so a pre-2017 bat is not automatically illegal in a park game, but any bat bought new for league cricket now conforms.
The practical consequence for a buyer: stop asking for a bigger bat. The legal maximum is fixed, so the only variables left are weight, where the mass sits, and how the maker has pressed the face.
Sizing
Bat sizes are trade conventions rather than laws. The numbered sizes run up through the junior range, then Harrow, then the adult sizes. Approximate height guidance, as used by most manufacturers:
| Size | Approximate player height |
|---|---|
| 3 | 4 ft 6 in to 4 ft 9 in |
| 4 | 4 ft 9 in to 4 ft 11 in |
| 5 | 4 ft 11 in to 5 ft 2 in |
| 6 | 5 ft 2 in to 5 ft 5 in |
| Harrow | 5 ft 5 in to 5 ft 8 in |
| Short handle (full size) | 5 ft 8 in to 6 ft 2 in |
| Long handle | Above 6 ft 2 in |
A bat that is too long for a young player forces the hands apart and wrecks the bottom-hand position. A bat that is too heavy does the same damage more slowly. Err light. Almost every coach in the country will tell you the same thing and almost every fourteen-year-old ignores it.
Preparing an English willow bat
Three steps, in order, and none of them optional.
- Oil. A thin coat of raw linseed oil on the face, edges and toe, left to dry, repeated once or twice. Thin coats. Oil is there to keep moisture in the wood, not to saturate it.
- Knock in. Several hours with a bat mallet, working the edges and toe hardest, hitting progressively harder. The point is to compress the surface fibres into a skin that will survive a new ball.
- Break in gently. Old balls in the nets before new ones, and no throwdowns with a hard ball at full pace on day one.
Bats sold as pre-prepared have had some of step two done by machine. They still need finishing by hand.
The ball, and why India's is different
Cricket balls are covered by Law 4, which sets the weight of a new men's ball between 155.9 g and 163 g and the circumference between 22.4 cm and 22.9 cm. A women's ball runs from about 140 g to 151 g and is slightly smaller; the under-13 junior ball is lighter and smaller again. Buying a ball of the wrong specification for an age group is one of the more common mistakes made by school and club sides.
What makes India distinctive is which ball is used at the top. Test cricket in India is played with the SG Test, made in Meerut, while most other countries use the Australian Kookaburra and England, Ireland and the West Indies use the Dukes. The differences are real and they are about the seam. The SG is hand-stitched with a thicker thread and the rows sit closer together, which leaves the seam standing proud far deeper into an innings than a Kookaburra's does — the Kookaburra is part machine-stitched and its seam flattens comparatively early. That proud seam is what gives Indian bowlers something to grip for reverse swing on an abrasive outfield, and it is part of why the ball goes soft in the particular way it does on subcontinental pitches. The mechanics of the phenomenon are set out in the explainer on how reverse swing works.
For club and practice use, the choice is between a four-piece leather ball, a two-piece, and the alternatives below.
| Ball | Typical use |
|---|---|
| Four-piece leather, red | League and multi-day cricket; holds shape longest |
| Two-piece leather | Practice and lower-division one-day cricket; cheaper, softer |
| White leather | Limited-overs cricket under lights |
| Cork or composition ball | Age-group and coaching use; harder than tennis, cheaper than leather |
| Tennis ball, taped or plain | Street, gully and most informal cricket in India |
Tennis-ball cricket deserves saying out loud rather than treating as a lesser thing. The overwhelming majority of cricket played in India is played with a tennis ball, often wrapped in electrical tape to add weight and make it swing, on concrete, on tar, between buildings. It builds hand speed and improvisation and it teaches nothing at all about playing a ball that bounces above waist height. Players who move from tape ball to leather almost always have to rebuild their footwork.
Protective equipment: what is actually required
The single non-negotiable item is the helmet, and there is a specification attached to it.
International cricket requires that a helmet worn while batting complies with the British Standard BS 7928:2013. That standard was updated in 2019 as BS 7928:2013 + A1:2019 to add specifications for neck protectors, and a compliant helmet is labelled accordingly, including whether it was tested against a men's ball or a junior ball. Several boards now make neck protectors compulsory when facing fast or medium pace. A helmet without that labelling has not been tested to the standard, regardless of how solid it feels in a shop.
Buy a helmet that fits now, not one to grow into. Grille adjustment matters: the gap between peak and grille must be small enough that a ball cannot pass through it, and that gap changes as the grille is moved.
Beyond the helmet:
- Batting pads. Fit is measured from the top of the instep to just above the knee. Pads that ride high leave the knee roll in the wrong place and slow you down between wickets. Lightweight pads are worth the money; you wear them for hours.
- Batting gloves. Split-finger for most players. Replace them when the padding compresses — this is the item people keep years too long.
- Abdominal guard. Compulsory in practice as much as in matches. There is no argument here.
- Thigh guard, arm guard, chest guard. Optional and personal. A thigh guard is close to standard; an inner thigh guard matters more on turning pitches where you play a lot off the pads.
- Wicketkeeping gloves and inners. Different sizing entirely, and inners are not optional. The technique they support is described in the piece on the art of wicketkeeping.
- Spikes or rubbers. Full spikes for grass, half spikes or rubbers for matting and hard grounds. Running spikes on a concrete practice area will end your ankles.
Where Indian equipment is made
Almost all of it comes from two clusters.
Meerut, in western Uttar Pradesh, is the larger. Its industry traces to Partition: the Anand family had founded a sports goods business in Sialkot in 1931 and rebuilt in Meerut afterwards, and what grew from that became Sanspareils Greenlands, the SG of the SG Test ball. Sareen Sports Industries, trading as SS, and B D Mahajan and Sons, trading as BDM, established themselves in the same city in the decades that followed. Between the large manufacturers, small workshops and independent bat makers, Meerut supplies a very large share of the world's cricket bats.
Jalandhar, in Punjab, is the second cluster, with a similar post-Partition history and a broader range across sports goods.
The important thing about both is that the work is hand work. A skilled craftsman reads a willow cleft — its grain, its moisture, how the season it grew in has left it — and presses and shapes accordingly. Machines do not handle that variability well, which is why bat making has resisted automation in a way that most manufacturing has not.
Building a kit on a budget
An honest order of priority for someone starting league cricket:
- Helmet to standard. Non-negotiable, and not the place to save.
- Abdominal guard and a decent pair of batting gloves.
- Pads that fit.
- Shoes appropriate to the surfaces you actually play on.
- Bat.
The bat comes last because a serviceable Kashmir willow bat will not stop you scoring runs in your first two seasons, whereas bad pads and a cheap helmet will stop you enjoying them. Total spend on protective gear will typically exceed spend on the bat, and that ratio is correct.
Buying secondhand works for bats and pads. It does not work for helmets — impact damage is not always visible, and a helmet that has taken a hit should be replaced.
Looking after the lot
Store bats upright, away from direct heat, never in a car boot in a Delhi summer and never in a damp bag after a monsoon match. Re-oil an English willow bat lightly at the start of each season and after heavy sanding. Repair toe damage early with a toe guard rather than late with glue. Dry keeping gloves and batting inners properly; the reason a kit bag smells is that nobody empties it.
If you play in India's club leagues you will discover that surfaces vary from turf to matting to bare earth within a single season, and that a bat which is fine in one is chewed up by another. Choosing gear around the ground you actually play on is more useful than choosing it around the ground you watch on television. The differences between surfaces are set out in the guide to cricket pitch types, and the venues at the top end of the game are covered in the guide to India's Test cricket grounds.
Where the equipment rules sit in the laws
Equipment is not a side issue in the Laws of Cricket; it is Laws 4 through 8 — the ball, the bat, the pitch, the creases and the wickets. The wicket itself is defined: three stumps standing 28 inches above the ground, spanning an overall width of 9 inches, with two bails on top. Those figures have not changed in living memory and they are the reason a bowler's target is the size it is.
If you are new to the sport's regulations, the summary of cricket laws every fan should know covers the ones that come up most often, and the cricket in India hub collects the rest of the domestic game — including how Ranji Trophy cricket with the SG ball differs from the cricket you see in franchise tournaments.
Sources and method
Equipment specifications here follow the MCC Laws of Cricket — Law 4 for the ball, Law 5 for the bat, Law 8 for the wickets — and the ICC clothing and equipment regulations for head protector standards, including the British Standard reference and its 2019 amendment covering neck protectors. Details of Indian manufacturing history are drawn from published long-form reporting on the Meerut and Jalandhar sports goods clusters and from manufacturers' own accounts of their founding. Bat sizing figures are manufacturers' and retailers' conventional guidance, not laws, and are given as approximations. Prices are deliberately not quoted: they vary by grade, city, season and taxation, and any figure published here would be wrong within months. This page is descriptive and contains no computed statistics.