Inside Gray-Nicolls’ revival of its iconic Scoop cricket bat, 50 years after the game-changing launch

Yet a few weeks ago in New Zealand, Gray-Nicolls brand manager Justin Lampard saw a different side. The pure reaction to the beauty of a cricket bat unites Test stars and park cricketers alike.

“When we pulled it out of the bag, Mitch was the first one over to it. He and Trav absolutely loved it,” Lampard says.

This wasn’t just any bat. ‘It’ was perhaps the most famous cricket bat ever produced: the Gray-Nicolls Scoop.

It’s been 50 years since the manufacturer first scooped out a section on the back of its blades, turning bat making and marketing on its head. Thus began the Scoop’s 20-year run as the flagship bat for the famous company.

While it has been occasionally revived since, this year’s half-century birthday of the Scoop sees it back in a big way.

Just how much cricket aficionados treasure the Scoop was shown when Cricket Australia ran an online poll to crown fans’ all-time favourite cricket bat.

The Scoop came out No. 1. Daylight was second.

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Stuart Kranzbuhler has been hand-making Gray-Nicolls bats in Melbourne for 30 years.

A young cabinet maker and keen player in the early 1990s, he saw an advertisement for a job and eventually became the company’s master bat maker.

This year he’ll make 7,000 of them, yet he admits there’s something special about crafting the Scoop.

“This is the first time we’ve made Scoops in Australia since the 1990s. I made them back then but I’d forgotten how much work went into them,” he tells CODE Sports.

Due to its ubiquity ever since, it’s hard to imagine just how unusual the scooped-out bat would have looked when first unveiled in 1974.

“It was based on perimeter weight, which had been introduced to golf, all about increasing mass wider of the middle of the bat while not affecting power in the middle,” Kranzbuhler says, as he completes the scooping process from the back of a new cleft of willow using a spindle moulder machine.

In 1972, South African golf club engineer Arthur Garner and British golf course designer Barrie Wheeler approached the Gray family in England with the idea to bring this golf technology to cricket, despite being rejected by other bat companies. By 1974, the Scoop was in production in the UK and Australia.

A bat engineered for a bigger sweet spot sounded a cricketer’s dream. Yet for the then-radical idea to take off, it needed some guinea pigs.

Gray-Nicolls had the biggest surname in Australian cricket on its books in 1974, so the Chappell brothers – Greg and Ian – were tasked with selling the Scoop to the masses.

Greg Chappell says that once the rationale was explained, he was eager to try the bat.

“The nearest thing at the time was the idea of perimeter weight on golf clubs and the concept was not dissimilar, so we had a bit of an idea what they were trying to do,” he tells CODE Sports.

“They looked different obviously with the scoop out of the back, but I was pretty open minded and remember thinking, ‘Oh well, give it a go and see what I think’.

“Firstly, the pick-up was terrific. I then had a hit with it in the nets first and I found them pretty good.”

From a business perspective, Chappell’s endorsement of the new product turned Gray-Nicolls into the gold standard for cricket in Australia.

“We started making bats in Australia 1973 and the scoop came out 1974, so it was the bat that put us on the map in Australia,” Lampard says.

For the record, Ian Chappell was the first player to walk out with it, in the first Test of the 1974-75 Ashes. The scoop was not yet painted its customary red but that had changed by the second Test. By 1976, it was officially titled the ‘Scoop’.

As a child of the 1970s, Kranzbuhler remembers the impact it had. Any scepticism about the ‘hollowed out’ middle was fast washed away by Chappell centuries.

“Having the Chappells use it gave it real credentials. It was not a mocked-up version, you were buying off the shelf what he used,” Kranzbuhler recalls.

“I don’t think there’s another bat that has had that buzz. Certainly at the time, every kid wanted it.”

Later there were twin scoops, then quad scoops which all built on the same principle.

“My estimate would be 150,000 scoops were made from the 1970s through to the 1990s,” Kranzbuhler says.

For Chappell, the scoop gimmick had substance. He now had a bat with forgiveness for the times he didn’t hit the ball in the middle.

“The concept of increasing the sweet spot actually worked, because they did have a bigger sweet spot than the traditional bat,” he says.

“Thick outside and inside edges went better. With an old bat, if you hit them in the middle they were fine but if you missed the middle, you really got no result. Therefore, you had to be pretty confident you were going to hit the ball in the middle if you wanted to go over the top, because if you missed the middle it wasn’t getting over the infield let alone the boundary.

“The Scoop gave you that confidence.”

Soon, the ‘GC Master Scoop’ became Chappell’s personal bat and bestseller. Chappell would use the Scoop until he retired in 1984.

“I just really liked them. I don’t think the four scoop really worked, but I had no doubt the original Scoop was a major improvement on what we’d had.

“And I never had one break on me.”

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The golfing duo of Garner and Wheeler had an 18-year patent for the design, which gave Gray-Nicolls exclusivity until 1990.

Other bat companies jumped on the bandwagon almost immediately (Dean Jones stepped out with his Kookaburra Ridgeback, in effect a Scoop knock-off, for the first time in February 1990), which blunted the Gray-Nicolls bat’s uniqueness.

Later that decade, the Scoop was superseded by other variations and models, though it did have one final hurrah. Brian Lara scored his then-Test world record 375 and first-class record 501* with a Scoop 2000.

But all these years later and despite it being put into only rare, limited production, the Scoop still resonates.

“It’s the first conversation I have when I tell people what I do, they want to know about the Scoop,” Kranzbuhler says.

Which brings us to the 50th birthday resurrection. Can the Scoop still be relevant today in an era of willow dried and pressed to the point that the chunkiest bats pick-up like toothpicks?

“The best part of bringing it back 50 years later is we can put all the technology we’ve learned since to make it even better,” says Kranzbuhler, who is in the middle of hand-making 300 Scoops.

Chappell is amazed at the size and lightness of modern bats, so is intrigued as to whether the Scoop will again make a splash.

“They certainly look good. If they are as good in comparison to the traditional bat as they were back in the day, they’ll be sensational,” he says.

“The modern conventional bat is pretty hard to go past. The old scoop was a very narrow bat, so the middle section of the scoop can’t have had much wood. So it will be interesting to see what the comparison is like.

“In 1974, there was a marked difference. If there’s a similar marked difference, everyone will want to use it.”

Marsh and Head have both indicated that they’d like to use the original replica Scoop after it is officially re-released later in the year. Marsh’s father, former Australian opening bat Geoff Marsh, took the Scoop baton from Chappell in the 1980s.

“It was really special for Mitch, holding the original,” Lampard says. “There was real nostalgia, and that’s what the Scoop does. It connects people to the game.

“I think it’s the most identifiable bat in our history, but also in the history of cricket.”

The last word belongs to the man who is joyously bringing the bat back to life in his workshop, hand-painting the iconic Scoop section red.

“I don’t think there’s been another bat like it since,” Kranzbuhler says.

The Gray Nicolls Single Scoop roll call 1974-1994

AUSTRALIA

Ian Chappell

Greg Chappell

Jeff Thomson

Doug Walters

Alan Turner

Ian Davies

David Hookes

Bruce Laird

Bruce Yardley

Andrew Hilditch

Rodney Hogg

Rod Marsh

John Dyson

Allan Border

Martin Kent

Trevor Chappell

Ken MacLeay

Graeme Wood

Greg Ritchie

Murray Bennett

Robbie Kerr

Dirk Wellham

Geoff Marsh

Mike Veletta

ENGLAND

Mike Denness

Tony Greig

Keith Fletcher

Graham Gooch

Phil Edmonds

Bob Woolmer

Frank Hayes

Peter Willey

Mike Brearley

Rachael Heyhoe Flint

Derek Underwood

Graham Barlow

Geoff Miller

David Gower

Chris Tavare

Brian Rose

Mike Gatting

Derek Pringle

Jan Brittin

Chris Lewis

SOUTH AFRICA

Barry Richards

Peter Kirsten

WEST INDIES

Gordon Greenidge

Lawrence Rowe

Andy Roberts

Keith Boyce

Roy Fredericks

Bernard Julien

Collis King

Clive Lloyd

Joel Garner

Jeff Dujon

Brian Lara

Adrian Griffiths

NEW ZEALAND

Brian Hastings

John Wright

Bruce Edgar

John Morrison

PAKISTAN

Mushtaq Mohammed

Sadiq Mohammed

Javed Miandad

INDIA

Bishan Bedi

Sunil Gavaskar

Yashpal Sharma

Sandeep Patil

SRI LANKA

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