What actually lives in a cricket bag

Every cricket bag contains three things that get used every week, a dozen that get used twice a season, and a fossilised banana. This is an attempt at the honest version.

The things you use every week

• Bat, gloves, pads, thigh pad, box, helmet. No surprises, and if any of them is broken it is the reason you are reading this page.
• Two pairs of socks. Wet feet at square leg are a slow misery and dry socks after tea are the cheapest luxury in the sport.
• Spare shirt. A whole afternoon in a wet one is not the same game.
• Sun cream, and yes, in this country. A cricketer stands outdoors for six hours and the burn always arrives on the day nobody expected it.

The things that earn their space

• A bat mallet, which lives in the bag rather than the garage, because bats need touching up through the season and the mallet in the garage never gets used.
• A spare grip and a grip cone. Grips perish, always away from home.
• Insulating tape. For a grip, a bail, a shoe, a bag strap, or a finger. It fixes more things on a Saturday than anything else in the bag.
• A second pair of laces. Snapping a lace ten minutes before you field is the most annoying possible way to be late.

The things that never come out

Everybody carries a spare bat they have not used since 2019 and a set of stumps that belong to the club. The spare bat is fine if it is genuinely your net bat. If it is a bat you no longer like, it is eleven hundred grams of nothing, and you carry it from car park to car park all summer.

The same goes for four pairs of gloves in various states of decay. Keep the good pair and the net pair. Bin the rest, because a wet glove in a bag with a good one makes both of them worse.

Two things that are not cricket equipment

A carrier bag for the wet stuff. Whites, socks, everything soaked, in their own bag rather than pressed against your pads for a week.

And food. Not tea, actual food, because plenty of clubs have stopped doing a proper tea and a bag of nuts at the fall of the fourth wicket has saved more innings than any coaching.

Wheels or shoulders

A wheelie bag is heavier empty and much easier at a ground with a car park a quarter of a mile from the pavilion, which is most of them. A duffle is lighter and better if you carry it up a flight of steps every week. Both are correct, and it depends entirely on the grounds in your league rather than on anything a review can tell you.

The end of season job

Empty it. All of it, out on the floor in September. Dry everything, bin what is broken, wash what smells, and make the list of what to replace before the January sales. It takes twenty minutes and it is the difference between opening the bag in April with a plan and opening it with a shock.