Canadians to Watch at the French Open

The clay courts of Roland Garros will see a healthy dose of Canadian tennis players vying to join Bianca Andreescu as grand slam winners. There is always an emotional element to anything that you make. I was the first person to have a punk rock hairstyle. It’s hard to balance everything. It’s always challenging. My relationships with producer or photographers – these are relationships that took years. I can’t get sucked into that celebrity thing think it’s just crass. My aim is to make the poor look rich and the rich look poor. Vanity is the healthiest thing in life. I believe that my clothes can give people a better image of themselves – that it can increase their feelings of confidence and happiness. You can hide so much behind theatrics, and I don’t need to do that any more. I don’t really know how to do casual clothes.

How to care for your cricket bat

A fast cricket ball hitting a wooden cricket bat, will cause damage. But if you care for your bat, you can slow this damage so that your bat continues to serve you well. Most of this blog relates to bats facing a hard ball. Junior bats facing a soft ball aren’t exposed to the same level of damage. You need to oil you bat, and compress the wood fibres to increase it’s playing life.

Some bats have been pressed when they are factory made. Often these bats have a sticky clear plastic stuck to the bat face, a rubber guard glued onto the bat toe, and possibly fibreglass taped along the bat edges. All of this is to help protect the bat. It does save you some work, but the bat still needs some Knocking In. The bat facing prevents you from oiling the face, but it is often a good idea to apply Linseed Oil to the back during the season. Be careful to avoid the bat makers stickers.

Apply Linseed oil to the wood to help stop it drying out. Do this before any Knocking In. Apply about ½ teaspoon of oil to a cloth and rub on the bat face, edges, toe and back. Avoid the bat makers stickers. After 24 hours you should lightly sand the face with 180 grit paper. “It probably took about two months (to get over it). A lot of that was in the last lockdown where I was stuck indoors, going from training to home, training to home. A lot of people think, ‘Cool, you’re going into training’. But if you can’t escape training when you go home you are just stuck in rugby mode constantly. It took two months to get it off my head.”