Batman - The story of the Mongoose

How a paddle-shaped cricket bat went from breakfast-TV to the front page of the Times of India, and what it cost.

19 March 2010 – London

In Chennai, it's the fourth over. Matthew Hayden, all six foot two of him, turns to the dugout and calls for a new bat.

In London, that's our cue. Dave, our sales manager, Dan, an e-commerce consultant who has somehow ended up in the cricket business, and I abandon our little office next door to the Professional Cricketers' Association and hurry round the corner to the Queen's No. 1 bar on Edis Street. Marcus, our CEO, is at the ground, sitting in the Chennai box. We are not.

The pub is empty. The projector is strictly for football, so we have to ask, a little sheepishly, whether they'd mind putting ITV4 on for three men and an Australian five thousand miles away.

I'm nineteen, and shaking like a leaf. Ten months ago, the bat being carried out to Hayden was a punchline on breakfast television. In about half an hour, everyone in cricket will be talking about it. In fifteen months, the company that makes it will be in administration. Nobody has told the pub.

This is the story of that bat, and my small part in it.

22 May 2009 – Lord's

On the morning of 22 May 2009, the sports world woke up, put the kettle on, and found a cricket bat on the television that looked like nothing anyone had seen before.

Internally it had been codenamed the Albert Trott, after the only man ever to hit a ball clean over the pavilion at Lord's. To everyone else it looked like a paddle, or a cricket bat assembled by someone working from a verbal description: a long handle and a short, fat blade. On the price list it was the MMi3. In terms of looks, it was the biggest change to the cricket bat in over a hundred years.

Ten minutes of prime-time BBC Breakfast. Another five on Channel 4 News. People talking about it at watercoolers, cricket grounds and pubs. Hype like that was unheard of for a sports product, let alone one launched on the Friday before the Monaco Grand Prix and a rugby cup final.

We launched at Lord's on purpose. The Media Centre made the perfect backdrop for the press shots, and the home of cricket lent some credibility to a strange new brand that badly needed it. Cricket, we wanted everyone to know, was moving into the twenty-first century, whether the members liked it or not.

Channel 4 News gave the bat five minutes on launch day

Channel 4 News gave the bat five minutes on launch day

May 2009 – Derby to London

Like most of the country, I saw the bat that Friday morning. I had no idea that within three days I'd be living in London and working for the company that made it.

I'd always been obsessed with sports equipment. I cared more about what players were using than about playing myself, which tells you most of what you need to know about my batting. When I left school in Derby at sixteen, straight after my GCSEs, my first job was on a farm in Crewe working for Fusion Sports, a family-run bat maker.

For my seventeenth birthday I flew to India on my own and spent two months in a factory in Meerut, shaving, shaping, stitching and sanding cricket gear. By seventeen and a half I'd talked my parents into lending me some money and started my own small brand, Itias, importing handmade bats from India and Pakistan.

Needless to say, all I wanted was to work in cricket. So when Marcus, the founder of Mongoose, appeared on the TV that morning, I fired off an email. Three days later I'd been interviewed and moved to London, albeit into a £25-a-night B&B for the first month. Glamour, it turns out, is mostly on television.

Summer 2009 – Primrose Hill

There were three of us, in a tiny office in Primrose Hill, and we were going to turn cricket on its head. Cricket had been going for a few hundred years. We liked our chances.

Our first problem was that, surprisingly, Mongoose had launched without any stock. Every bat was to be handmade to order by Tony Cook, a master craftsman with fifty years at the bench, working for Hunts County Bats. Tony could make about five bats a day. The national launch brought in more than forty orders in the first couple of days. You can do the maths. We did, and then tried not to.

That gap between supply and demand never really went away. For the rest of Mongoose's life we were fighting cash flow and trying to keep customers happy at the same time.

Then the orders dried up. The launch buzz and a single outing for Stuart Law faded, and like any business with no PR or marketing, customers started to forget we existed. A couple of months of chasing later, we signed our first big name, Dwayne Smith, the hard-hitting West Indian all-rounder playing for Sussex in the closing stages of the English T20 competition. T20 is the short, three-hour version of the game, invented for people who think five days is a long time to watch anything.

What we hadn't considered was that cricketers might not actually use our 'game-changing' bat. In his first match for Mongoose, Dwayne walked out with his usual bat wearing our stickers, disguised as our CoR3, the model in our range that looked most like a normal bat. It was a very convincing disguise. In a whole year with us, he used the headline-grabbing MMi3 exactly once, in an exhibition game in Australia.

We'd lured him from another brand with a big jump in endorsement fees and generous performance bonuses. The sums weren't huge, but they set the tone for everything that followed. From then on, our reputation with players was that we'd pay better than anyone.

August 2009 – The bosses house

From the outside, Mongoose looked secure. We had a West Indian star on the books and were in talks with an Australian fast bowler for the upcoming Ashes. Yet, on the inside, we were falling apart.

One evening in August 2009, I was invited round to MCF's house and told that my salary for the month couldn't be guaranteed. Marcus had poured his life, soul and savings into the business, and the money had run out. An investment that everyone assumed was a formality had collapsed over IP disputes and other squabbles.

At the same time, we'd accepted that selling only through our website wasn't going to work. Without heavy advertising we'd manage a couple of sales a day, which is not how you take over the world. So we decided to go into UK retail, with less than a month to design, prototype, cost and launch a full range. Optimistic, to say the least. I called on the suppliers I'd got to know in India, and we started designing protective gear out of materials cricket had never used, aiming to make the lightest kit on the market.

The final designs reached India a week before the trade show. The prototypes that came back were, to put it kindly, an interpretation.

In mid-September, a group of private individuals put in an emergency loan, later converted to equity. It kept us going for now, but our production plans were a complete mess.

We went and exhibited at the Lord's trade show anyway, a single event in September where all the retailers come together and pour over the new stickers from each brand for the upcoming year. That's where Nick Keeley, then batmaker at Newbery (now of Keeley Cricket), gave me the advice that stuck with me more and more as the years went on: "You don't see me driving around in a Ferrari. You'll never get rich from cricket bats."

We priced the bats at £259 retail and £140 trade, the price a shop paid us excluding VAT, it was comfortably below some of our competitors' equivalents at £350 or more. And in hindsight, a little too cheap. Regardless, much of the old cricket trade was sceptical, and we came away with orders for around 160 bats, all due for delivery between September and October – so in the next few weeks.

None of them had been made. Retail runs on 30-day terms, meaning shops pay a month after their stock arrives, and occasionally a month after that, so we'd have to pay for all 160 up front and then survive another couple of months before seeing a penny.

Indian suppliers like Sareen Sports had been burned by the collapse of Woodworm, another brand people loved to compare us to, and wanted full payment in advance. Then there were the timings. A month or more to make a stock order, then another forty days at sea. Air freight was quicker, but cost around twenty times as much.

In the end it was Hunts County that saved us again. They had their own orders to fill, but they moved heaven and earth to get ours out.

November 2009 – From Kashmir to Huntingdon

The more we sold into shops, the more retailers asked for things we didn't have. Top of the list was a junior bat.

The junior market runs on Kashmir willow, the heavier, harder, much cheaper cousin of the English willow that proper bats are made from, and the bat most of us learned on. A Kashmir bat costs £4 to £8 to make in the factories of Jalandhar or Meerut. They're low quality, but they're how children first fall for a brand. Our cheapest bat was over £100.

Our attitude at Mongoose was always to build the interest first and solve supply later. Supply problems were almost seen as a positive. After all, who wants to go into a nightclub that doesn't have a queue? By mid-November we had more than 150 junior Kashmir willow bats to deliver between December and March, and Indian lead times of over two months. In short, we needed Kashmir willow bats within the week. Impossible. Even Tony only had two hands.

So we went back to Hunts County and took what must be the least cost-effective route in the history of bat making. We bought their stock of men's Kashmir willow bats and cut them down into juniors, right there in Huntingdon. Genius? Maybe not, but we sold them at £26.50 trade and somehow still made a small profit, on what were surely the only Kashmir willow bats ever made in England.

We finished 2009 with around 350 bats sold and roughly £45,000 in revenue. Promising, but a lot less than you'd expect after a national TV launch. The cricket trade was turning out to be tougher than we'd thought.

Winter 2009 – The signings

Sales were slow, but the name was spreading. Word of the Dwayne Smith deal brought a queue of agents, all keen to get their players signed and their hands on our new investment.

Late in 2009 we signed the New Zealander Lou Vincent and Mohammad Ashraful, the flamboyant Bangladesh captain we called the Bangladeshi Ian Bell. Neither scored many runs for us. Five years later, both were exposed as match-fixers.

Our least suspect signing was James Anderson. Not famous for his batting, but England's poster boy, and his sponsorship ran to a significant five-figure sum. For the first time in history, someone was going to make a fuss about the bat of an England number eleven.

Most cricket photoshoots involve a player in whites swinging a bat around a studio. Ours brought in the assistant of fashion designer Isabella Blow and dressed Jimmy in Armani, Dunhill and Givenchy. Not a single cricket ball was harmed. The pictures were spectacular, worthy of GQ.

But was that the best use of the money? Did Jimmy Anderson ever sell a Mongoose bat?

We'd learned from Dwayne, though. Every player now had to survive a net session with the bat before signing (batting practice inside what is essentially a very long fishing net), so we knew they'd actually use it. Early 2010, when I wasn't chasing production or investment, was spent on Cricinfo and on the phone to agents. At eighteen, it was heaven. I was meeting my heroes and hoping to see them use something I'd helped design.

Less glamorous than schmoozing international superstars was haggling with the county pros, the professionals who play for England's domestic county sides. I vividly remember answering the office phone to an Essex player we'd never spoken to, who introduced himself by his first name only and asked us to send some bats down for the lads to try.

By the start of the 2010 season we had around five county pros, including Gareth Andrew, Chris Benham, Ian Blackwell and Azhar Mahmood. The deal was the same as ever. Small retainers, which is to say money for turning up with our sticker on, and hefty bonuses if the runs came.

11 March 2010 – Delhi launch

We'd had our eye on India and the IPL, the Indian Premier League, from day one. Raina, Smith, Dilshan and Gayle were all names thrown around the office. But the man we wanted to lead the charge was Matthew Hayden.

Hayden had won the Orange Cap, the IPL's prize for the top run-scorer, in 2009, averaging 53.45 in T20. Chris Gayle was averaging 35. Gray-Nicolls had dropped him a couple of years earlier, so the IPL's top run-scorer was, somehow, without a bat sponsor. We could fix that. I'd grown up on the 2005 Ashes, so to me he was an icon, and we thought he could make the Goose look like a genuine cricket bat rather than a gimmick.

We'd first got the bat into his hands during the 2009 Ashes, when he was in England commentating. We set up a net at the Middlesex academy in Finchley and he had a hit. He was also thinking about life after cricket. He already had a cooking show and regular TV work in Australia, and his management were interested in sports investment. We saw the chance of a long-term partnership.

The contract followed our usual pattern, turned up to eleven. A perfect innings from Hayden could have cost us more than $200,000 USD, with bonuses for three, five or six sixes in an over and for every fifty and hundred. Every bonus depended on him using the radical MMi3 rather than the safer CoR3.

The deal was done in early February 2010. Hayden sent through a tracing of his hand and his leg measurements, and ordered twenty pairs of gloves. We shipped around forty bats to Chennai from Hunts County and Sareen Sports, who'd made his bats the year before. He wasn't particularly fussy. He wanted bats of around 2lb 10oz, ideally with a bit of red heartwood in the blade, the darker wood from the middle of the tree, which some players swear makes a bat perform better.

We also signed Andrew Symonds of the Deccan Chargers. He had no intention of using the MMi3 and sent over his own bats for our makers to copy: 2lb 10oz, a very thin shoulder (where the blade meets the handle), a low middle (the sweet spot, set near the bottom of the blade) and a rounded back.

We launched in India on 11 March 2010, the day before the IPL started. We'd toyed with a teaser campaign, sending Hayden out with a blank bat bearing a huge question mark. In the end, after how well the UK launch had gone, we stuck with a traditional one. Marcus and Hayden did a Q&A at a hotel in Delhi, and we hastily put up a net outside so the press could get action shots, which is how a Delhi hotel briefly gained a cricket net.

The next morning we were in every major Indian paper, including the front page of the Times of India. India had gone Mongoose crazy.

What we hadn't sorted was, well, anything to do with selling the bats. Ideally we'd have been like Apple, rolling hundreds of them into shops the next morning. We didn't have a single bat in India, or a distributor, or a salesman, or a shop that had agreed to stock them.

19 March 2010 – The big day in Chennai

Which brings us back to the Queen's No. 1, and the projector.

The bat's first televised outing is against the Delhi Daredevils. Hayden opened with a traditional bat. On the second ball of the fourth over he signals for the twelfth man, cricket's designated drinks waiter, who tonight is carrying something far more important than squash. So does his batting partner, Suresh Raina, who is keen to try the Mongoose even though he's sponsored by SG.

It's the first time any of us have seen the MMi3 live on TV. I imagine bringing your first child into the world feels something like it.

His first ball is a dot, cricket's polite word for nothing happening. Then a single. The commentators are laughing, wondering aloud whether anyone can time a ball with half a bat. Dave, Dan and I refresh Twitter. Then we refresh it again.

Then, against Rajat Bhatia, all hell breaks loose. Four, four, four, six. The medium pace is no match for Hayden's power and timing. Next comes Tillakaratne Dilshan, trying to take the pace off, and Hayden tonks him for 21 in his first over, three of them sixes. That one over alone will cost Mongoose more than $18,000 in bonuses. It may be the best money we ever spend.

The brash bullying carries on until Hayden is caught for 93. He's faced 43 balls. In an empty pub in Primrose Hill, the only people watching are us.

Watch the highlights of the innings

By the time we stopped refreshing, the Mongoose was trending worldwide on Twitter. We were on the front of every Indian paper again. ITV put together a montage that they rolled out every time Chennai played. We were sure this was the moment Mongoose would become the force we'd always said it would be, in India and at home.

June 2010 – Fewer than fifty

In the whole history of Mongoose, we sold fewer than fifty bats in India.

We'd spent more than $500,000 on the launch and sponsorship in what we'd always called the big opportunity. It was a catastrophic failure, and the reason was simple. We launched before we had anyone to sell the bats.

The decision to go into India came late, leaving us less than three months to build new branding, arrange manufacturing, sign players, run a press launch and set up nationwide distribution, all while the UK business went into its busiest season. We got the launch right. We even had 1,500 bats sitting ready at the factory. But India is a fragmented market where retailers expect face-to-face visits and personal phone calls, not the occasional call and an online ordering system that works in the UK. We'd been offered a licensing deal with a manufacturer early on. Looking back, we should probably have taken it.

Instead we threw together a deal with Sareen Sports for 100 signed limited-edition bats at over 20,000 rupees each, right at the top of the market, on sale or return, meaning the shops only paid us for the bats they sold. Sareen made our bats, but they were also India's number two bat brand, and a bold British upstart that seemed to have money to burn can't have looked like a friend. Only a handful of those bats were ever sold and paid for.

With almost nothing in the shops, the counterfeiters moved in. For a while, the easiest Mongoose to buy in India wasn't one of ours, and then interest drained away altogether.

On the pitch, Hayden never passed 30 again for the rest of the tournament, and plenty of people decided the bat had been a fad. Symonds stuck with the traditional CoR3, which never made a headline. By June 2010, two months after the launch, we were close to invisible in India. Going back would have meant starting again from scratch.

It had been futile. But what a ride it was.

Summer 2010 – Pink, purple and red

Most people would assume India finished Mongoose off. Weirdly, it didn't. We actually considered the launch a relative success – for the first time someone had used the bat successfully.

Back in 2010, the IPL was the only cricket on terrestrial TV in the UK. IPL games peaked at 560,000 viewers, while England's Tests in Bangladesh at the same time averaged around 160,000. So despite our troubles in the Indian market, Hayden's innings did sell bats at home. Between March and May we sold around 950 bats for £57,000, compared with 300 bats and £25,000 between September and December. We hired two new salesmen, one of them a brilliant South African sales manager who would go on to run the company after it went into administration in 2011.

In early Summer we also saw industry recognition, winning an industry award for the greatest technological innovation in sport. The previous year's winner had been the Speedo swimsuit that was later banned from competition. We chose to see that as good company.

With our big sponsorships, we were of course nowhere near profitable and by now we had 25 sponsored players on the books. Alongside Hayden, Anderson and Symonds were less famous, and less talented, names: Ashraful, Malinga Bandara, Phil Edwards, Suraj Randiv, Adrian Shankar. One player was earning more than £15,000 a year. Some county players were on retainers above £10,000. That's a lot of bats we'd have to sell. At five a day, Tony wasn’t going to be retiring anytime soon.

None of it dented the optimism. In August 2010 we raised another £220,000 to fund production for 2011 and the bold plans we still had for Australia, India and South Africa. At our previous round, in November 2009, shares had been priced at around £30 and the company at about £800,000. This time the price was £75 a share, and Mongoose was valued over £2 million. The India mess hadn't dampened anyone's spirits.

The fun part

For me, this was the most exciting time at Mongoose. We'd go to the drawing board, come up with something crazy and then try to get it made in India.

We used to study the Pantone forecasts for the colours of the coming seasons, and for 2010/11 we went with pink, purple and red. We took the unusual step of using a different colour for each grade of bat (bats are graded on the quality of the willow), so any pads and gloves would match any bat in the range. Pad and glove design had barely moved since Puma's bright orange Classic range around 2005, and we wanted to push things on.

The trickiest problem was the bat sticker. Designs in 2010 were very square, and the hardest part of the job is making a bat recognisable from a hundred yards. Our answer came from the strangest of places. In 2010 the off-the-shoulder dress was on every catwalk, and we loved it, so we turned it into a bat sticker. I'd like to think it's still the only cricket bat ever dressed by the catwalk.

For most of June and July 2010 the office was covered in drawings, scribbles and mockups.

As ever, nothing came back from India right first time. The early samples had all the wrong colours, so we wrote a full specification document and tried again.

1 December 2010 – Bay Sixty6

The 2010/11 range had a third bat in it. The CoR3 and the MMi3 both had shorter blades, and plenty of players and retailers still wanted something that looked like a normal cricket bat. So we launched the ToRQ, a full-length blade with a mini-splice, a shorter version of the joint where the handle slots into the blade, to sit alongside them.

In December 2010 we signed Marcus Trescothick on a three-year deal. He'd opened for England in 76 Tests, captained Somerset, and held the record for the fastest fifty in English T20, off 13 balls. We launched him at Bay Sixty6, a skate park in West London, where he smashed balls around the half-pipes with an MMi3 for the cameras. It's not a sentence you get to write about many England openers. His contract said he'd use the MMi3 in at least half his one-day games. In practice the ToRQ ended up being his main bat.

Then there was the headline. Trescothick would get £1 million if he cleared the pavilion at Lord's in any 20- or 40-over game the following summer. Only one man had ever done it, Albert Trott in 1899, the same man our bat had been codenamed after two years earlier.

It made the papers. What the papers didn't know was that it had been dreamt up on the fly. We never insured it, and it was never formally agreed. Trescothick never took a shot at the pavilion. If he had, I'm still not sure whose sofa we'd have been searching for the million.

Early 2011 – Leaving

Cricket equipment runs on a year from October to October, and retailers order in two drops. The first is in November, for winter nets and new launches. The second is in March, for the start of the season. On 30-day terms, that means money comes in over the winter and again in the spring. After that, apart from chasing what's still owed for the March deliveries, there's nothing until the next November.

Our costs worked the other way round. Summer is when players score runs, and when players score runs on a Mongoose, the bonuses rack up. So every summer, money was going out just as it stopped coming in.

I didn't make it to that summer. I left in early 2011, pretty overwhelmed by the stress of it all. I was trying to get bats made at the last minute, working out how to freight them with no cash to pay for it, and keeping retailers happy while chasing targets as aggressively as we could. I could see where it was heading.

Four months later, it got there.

22 June 2011 – Administration

The company had been trying to raise more investment, but it was loss-making with significant creditors, and nobody would put money in. On 24 May 2011, two years and two days after the launch at Lord's, one of the shareholders referred MCF to the insolvency practitioners Wilkins Kennedy. The business was advertised for sale in the Financial Times on 10 June, and the administrator, an insolvency practitioner who takes control of the company to sell what they can for its creditors, was formally appointed on 22 June.

Details of the sale went out to more than 200 potential buyers. Twelve were interested and four bid. On 12 July 2011 the business was sold for £235,000 plus VAT to a new company set up by a consortium, most of whom were already Mongoose shareholders. Almost all of the price was for the intellectual property and goodwill. The stock was valued at £5,000, though even then the IP still wasn't straightforward. A third party claimed ownership of it, and the lawyers went to counsel three times over the claim.

The new company took the Mongoose Cricket name, and the old one was renamed Cricket Realisations Limited, which is about as far from Mongoose as a name can get. There were five employees left at the end, and two moved across. MCF, who had invented the bat and started the company, wasn't a director or shareholder in the new one.

28 July 2011 – What was left

The administrator's report, dated 28 July 2011, laid out the numbers.

The company had around £139,500 in assets, almost all of it money still owed by retailers or unsold stock.

It owed nearly £659,000, including £340,500 to trade creditors, £193,000 in loans and around £55,000 to HMRC. That left creditors £519,000 short, and the £506,000 shareholders had put in was gone too. Over £1 million in total.

Several of the names on the creditors' list were familiar.

Hayden was the single biggest creditor, owed four times as much as Hunts County, the batmakers who had kept us afloat in 2009. The deal we'd been so proud of in February 2010 was the biggest debt the company left behind.

Figures from the Report and Administrator's Proposals for Mongoose Cricket Limited (in administration), Wilkins Kennedy, 28 July 2011, using the amounts in the company's statement of affairs.

April 2020 – The other end

Two years and a month after that morning at Lord's, the company was in administration. The Mongoose name carried on under its new owners, but the bat didn't last much longer than we did.

Only two years after its IPL debut, the Indian press was asking where it had gone. Raina, who had long since gone back to a traditional bat, told them it was great for big hitting but no good for defending.

Reading it back, the warning signs were there from the first week. We kept creating demand we couldn't meet, and we kept paying players to promote a bat plenty of them didn't want to use. India was just the biggest version of both.

In April 2020, with the IPL postponed by the pandemic, Matthew Hayden nominated Suresh Raina on Twitter to share his favourite IPL moment.

Raina picked the night in Chennai. He reminded Hayden that he'd been captaining the side that game and had made 49 not out at the other end, while Hayden made 93 with that Mongoose bat. He still had the signed bat Hayden had given him, he said.

A few weeks later, on a Chennai Super Kings Instagram live, Hayden told the story from his side. MS Dhoni, his captain, had begged him not to use it: "I'll give you anything you want in life to not use this bat." Hayden used it anyway. When you hit it from the middle, he said, the ball went twenty metres further.

Nick Keeley was right. Nobody got rich from cricket bats. But ten years on, the man at the other end still had his signed Mongoose, and Hayden's 93 was the first IPL moment he thought of.

This story was originally posted as a 4 part series on Medium.