I'm John Batcher, the Friends of History

Debating Society, to New South Wales, Jeremy Sackus, my cricket coach.

First thing I asked Jeremy was, is cricket at the Olympics?

And the answer is no?

Badmittens at the Olympics and not cricket.

Okay, fine.

We set that aside.

The Olympic Committee has a lot of catching up to do. Now we come to a phenomenon I didn't know to ask

Jeremy a broken bat. It's routine in American baseball now the colleges and some of the little leagues play with an

aluminum bat. You can't break that, but you can't break a Louisville

Slugger. I didn't think to ask you ever could you break a cricket bat. Can you

break one? Well John it turns out you can and it is a very very rare event and and the

reason why it's so rare is because cricket bats are made with a very hard

wood and they're also very thick so they're about an inch and a half thick in the middle and

basically a very strengthened very strong piece of wooden equipment.

So breaking a cricket bat is actually very, very hard to do,

even if you wanted to do it on purpose.

So for example, they have been demonstrations where basically using machinery they've shown how much pressure it takes to actually break it back and normally it's beyond what a natural human can do.

So bats are actually structurally very sound. But it is possible.

And what we've learned this week was in county cricket in England,

that's exactly what happened.

A batsman Matthew Lamb was playing against a county side and it was just a normal game. It wasn't say a

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