Every cricket bat is dying, just at different speeds. When the face is pressed, the fibres of the willow are crushed together. About a centimetre of unpressed wood is compacted down to a couple of millimetres to make it hard enough to resist the repeated impact of a fast-moving, hard leather ball. The process of pressing hasn't changed significantly. Modern bats are pressed just slightly less. As the bat is used, the fibres that have been pushed together begin to separate in a process called delamination. In the early stage of delamination the bat reaches its peak, when the ball will feel as though it is trampolining from the face. Cook and Ramprakash, the last generation to have grown up with their bats pressed slightly harder, still prefer to play a bat in themselves in the nets, where they feel the delamination begin. It's an unfamiliar concept now, when bats are effectively already beginning to delaminate before a ball has struck the face, and no longer need as much "knocking in"', the age-old job that used to start the process.
Last summer, Sky Sports asked King to make a series of replica bats for an experiment conducted by Mike Atherton and Andrew Strauss. King made five, each one echoing a different era of cricket, from the days of Grace to the present season. Atherton and Strauss discovered that the performance when the ball was struck in the centre of the bat was almost the same. The differences came when the connection was less good, made low down or high up or towards one or other of the edges. While older bats demanded purity, the bats of the 21st century were far more forgiving.
In this, there is a parallel with golf, where older, bladed clubs required a precise strike, while the more modern cavity-backed irons were designed to eliminate an amateur's mistakes yet found their way into the professional game. It would be easy to draw a line through the evolution of bats to the increased dominance of batsmen, especially in white-ball cricket. Those in the commentary box, with the benefit of super slo-mo and Hot Spot, see a ball hit off-centre and still fly over the boundary and give credit to the maker.
Yet as in golf, to attribute the advancement of a sport to an advancement in the gear it's played with is a reductive argument. Once Tiger Woods had begun dismantling the world's best courses by driving the ball more than 300 yards, a new generation of players grew up watching him and began to do the same. Cricket too had its outliers: Gayle, Virender Sehwag and others, men who compiled huge scores faster than ever before by striking boundary after boundary.
Cricketers hit the gym. They got muscle. What had changed was intent, the intent to hit the ball harder and further and more often. Intent fed batsmanship, which fed the change in bats and so on in an endless upward spiral.
