It’s a sad day – one of England’s home grown players (as opposed to our approaching South African half team) has decided to move from using Gunn & Moore equipment to the powerhouse of Adidas. Broad is the third England player to make the move to Adidas after Ian Bell and, of course, Kevin Pietersen.

23-year old Broad moving from Gunn & Moore is somewhat of a suprise, with them being a Nottingham based company and Broad being born in Nottingham and playing for Nottinghamshire, but I imagine that money talks, and who can blame Broad for making the most he can during his career. He has turned down playing lucrative IPL cricket so far though, so money isn’t necessarily the over-riding factor in this switch, who knows. He’s got to pay for that Range Rover Sport and Jaguar XKR somehow though!

Adidas undoubtedly see Broad as someone who can market their brand well, and with his raised profile over the last year and young boy looks he will fit the bill for them pretty well. Kids will see him using the equipment and want to use the same kit as him (he should be using the Adidas Libro), and he’ll appear in numerous billboards/magzine adverts over the coming months. I’m still not sold on either the looks of the Adidas equipment, or the fact that it is being made elsewhere and Adidas stickers just being added on but hey, I’m not really their target market!

The Adidas Pellara is the flagship bat in the Adidas cricket bat range, endorsed by none other than Kevin Pietersen! He has used Adidas bats for the last year or so, and although 2009 wasn’t the best year of his career due to injury, his recent showing in the 2010 T20’s against Pakistan show he is headed back to his best with the Adidas Pellara in his hand.

Updated for the 2010 season, the Pellara has a low and long middle designed for the player who likes to get forward and drive the ball aggressively. This season it also has a ridged profile as you can see in the images – this helps put the weight and wood where you want it most, in the middle. By reducing the amount of weight on the outside of the bat this also means it stays lightweight, as most bats need to do these days. It also helps with keeping the pick up light and balanced, without which you will never play a good shot!

The Pellara is available in various grades of wood as follows:
Adidas Pellara Elite (approx £270)
Adidas Pellara Pro (£210)
Adidas Pellara County (£160)
Adidas Pellara Club (£120)
Adidas Pellara County Junior (£80)

Despite all the fuss surrounding Adidas’ entrance into the cricket equipment market I didn’t see many of these bats on the club circuit last year, so if you like to stand out then the Adidas Pellara will certainly do that. The yellow and black colourway of the Pellara may put some people off, but it doesn’t look too brash when actually being used, it just makes a statement that you mean business!

Around February every year the cricket equipment shops around the country start sending out their catalogues and get us very excited about the new cricket gear coming into season! With club nets started or starting soon, ever player starts to think about what they need for the 2010 season, and we are hopefully going to help you through the process!

With such a large amount of kit out there how do you choose?! Hopefully we’ll give you all the information you need to make an informed choice about what to buy yourself and where to get it from. The layout of this blog is going to change a bit to hopefully guide you around all the new content that is going to be on this site over the coming days, weeks and months.

We want to hear from you as well about what kit you want, have bought or are lusting after – so leave your comments under each post and let us know what you think.

Finally, if you think we are missing a trick about a certain company or product – please get in touch. If you are a small company there is a chance we will miss you out so please get in touch with us and let us know about your products!

Last year we had Adidas entering the cricket equipment market and now we have news that Nike is following suit, with a range of equipment coming to the UK for the 2010 season. Nike have made some cricket spikes, the Nike Air Zoom shoes for a couple of years now, although they have never been available in the UK unless you import them at a ludicrous price. Now they are set to bring along some bats, pads, gloves etc so that they can fight on the same territory as Adidas and bring another big brand name to the equipment party.

I haven’t got the details of where the equipment is coming from (ie their own factories or a third party), but with already some Indian’s playing with Nike badges on their bats I suspect there will be an Indian slant to the manufacture and distribution. Apparently their spikes will still be a stupid price, but being Nike they probably think they can get away with it.

I’m not sure where I sit with another big sports brand entering the market – something like this is normally a good thing, but is it true to say they bring quality products or do they just use their brand to make money without a care for the game? I’ll stick with using a “proper” cricket manufacturer for the moment I think….

Now, I may be a little late to the party on this so if you already knew about it, great, if you didn’t – read on. I received an e-mail last night from Amazon which caught my attention since there was a picture of KP on the front of a computer game called “Ashes 09″. Pretty crappy name for a game if you ask me as people don’t immediately know if you’re playing a game or talking about the real thing, but never mind. When I read a bit more about it, it was clear that it was from the same people as the successful “Brian Lara” series of games, updated for 2009.

There is a demo on the XBox marketplace for those of you inclined like that, or you can wait until the game is released a week on Friday (7th August). I would normally pre-order it straight away from somewhere like amazon, but since my xbox is broken I’m going to have to hope a mate buys it instead for the moment!

Game wise, there is a lot of talk about new features, upgraded gameplay and graphics etc. The last game was pretty playable, but was horribly unfinished and full of little annoying bugs that hopefully they’ve ironed out this time. From the videos I’ve see, Ashes 09 should continue the series pretty well, although it is only “licensed” from the looks of things by the ECB and Cricket Australia, which might mean they are the only teams with “proper” names, which may only sound like a little bugbear, but doesn’t help with the “realism” experience.

Anyway, since I can’t play it at the moment I shall leave it to you in the comments to let me know what you think of the game (demo or otherwise)!