A stroke of bad luck

Kookaburra apparently spend $600,000 to work with Melbourne professor Roger La Brooy and his team at RMIT University to develop a "superbat" whose carbon handles allowed hitting further with less effort. Even Gray-Nicolls jumped on board. But there was to be no major sporting revolution and the battered bat with a barren handle now sits in a Melbourne office cluttered with robotics, NASA printouts and bulky tomes on aerospace engineering. Nick Walshaw finds out more in the Daily Telegraph.