After international cricket players from Oman and UAE utilised Kashmir Willow bats in the T20 World Cups, demand for these bats skyrocketed across the world.
About 17 additional cricketers from six countries have acquired Kashmiri Willow bats in preparation for the ODI World Cup 2023, which will be hosted in India this coming October.
Many in this business are pleased that more nations are adopting the use of Kashmiri Willow bats at the highest levels of the sport. More clubs are anticipated to purchase the bats in the near future.
According to them, between Sangam and Awantipora in south Kashmir there are over 400 cricket bat manufacturing facilities, and the bats of one unit (GR8 Sports) have made it to the world scene.
After much effort, a few players from Oman and the United Arab Emirates played with Kashmiri bats, and now 17 more players from six nations have agreed to play with their bats, according to Fawzul Kabir, a 30-year-old MBA graduate from the Islamic University of Science and Technology (IUST) Awantipora who is pursuing PhD at the DCU in Ireland. He added that UAE’s star cricketer Junaid Siddiqui used a Kashmir Willow bat of GR8 Sports to hit the biggest 6 of the ICC T20 World Cup against Sri Lanka in Australia last year. The bats are made at the GR8 Sports industry in the Halmulla Sangam area of Anantnag, the first and only ICC-approved brand of J-K till date.
Owner Kabir, who took over the business his father established in Kashmir in 1974, has seen a rise in demand for his Kashmiri bats abroad. He expressed optimism that in the near future all cricketing countries will use Kashmiri bats in their games.
According to Fawzul, cricketers from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the West Indies, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman would use Kashmiri bats in upcoming matches. We want the best cricket players in the world to use our bats, and the number of countries that use them keeps growing, he added.
He went on to say, “This is just the beginning for us, and we are hopeful very soon that famous international players will play with our bats.” “We have already sent consignments to around two dozen countries and many orders are also in the queue,” he stated.
Since we are the only ones who can manufacture these bats at a far smaller rate than what English willow costs, he said, Kashmiri bats have emerged as serious rivals to English willow bats.
Now, he said, the goal is to have superstars like Virat Kohli, Babar Azam, and others use bats produced in Kashmir.
Kabir further, saying that previously they only produced white-label items or bat raw materials at this facility, before shipping them to Jalandhar, Meerut, and other places where they manufactured bats under their own brand and sold them to foreign players.
“Now, we are preparing bats here only, and it is the first time that our manufacturing has reached the ODI World Cup,” Kabir added. “The last players played with Kashmiri bats in the T20 World Cup.”
