The brightly-coloured duo of the Habanero and Jalapeno are two fine cricket bats from the Piri Piri range.
skysports.com tests out two very spicy pieces of willow...
Think Piri Piri is just the name of a type of hot sauce that goes nicely on a chicken burger? Well you can think again, because now cricket too has a spicy offering of the same name.
The line on the company's website states that they produce 'flaming hot bats' and the two tested out from Piri Piri certainly didn't disappoint.
First up was the
Habanero Pro, a fine-looking piece of willow designed with a low middle and also at the low-end of the price scale (the 5 chilli version costs a penny light of £200 - a bargain at modern-day prices).
The fact that the sweet spot is towards the bottom of the blade suggests that this is a bat best used in the hands of a man (or woman) who likes to clear the rope, rather than stroke the ball out somewhere towards it.
However, that is by no means to say that it is just for a player who wants to pack a punch with ambitious straight drives and rip-roaring cut shots.
Closer to a stroke-maker than a power-hitter myself (because the steer to third man is classified as a stroke these days, rather than a thick outside edge), I found the green-coloured Habanero to be an excellent piece of wood in every aspect.
When it came to hitting shots it was noticeable just how much that lower middle helped - without trying to hit full deliveries somewhere into next week, front-foot drives seemed to ping off the bat with real ease.
Cuts and pulls were also timed sweetly, but it was really on the front foot (a place where club cricketers seem to spend most of their time) where the Habanero singled itself out as something special.
Real beauty
That was, though, until it came to testing out its big brother - the Jalapeno. A combination of the Habanero and the Naga Jolokia (the other weapon in the Piri Piri range), this yellow-and-black-handled bat was a thing of real beauty.
My appetite for it was immediately whetted when I picked it up for the first time; the clever weight distribution meant it had a balanced pick-up, making it comfortable right from the off.
Like its fellow family members it has a low middle (though not quite as low as the Habanero), but the difference this time was that the balance was much more evenly distributed, with a lot more bulk towards the top.
The bat became more and more impressive with every shot that came out of the sumptuous middle, though the slightly thicker toe also came in handy on the odd occasion when I didn't quite find the sweet spot.
I say odd occasion, because more often than not deliveries seemed to just race off the blade. If the Habanero was good (and it was very, very good), then the Jalapeno was a class apart - like watching Barcelona play football, it just never seemed to disappoint.
The corrugated grips on both bats were comfortable and the stylish stickers - complete with a brightly-coloured, angry-looking chilli pepper on a black background - makes both eye-catching additions to any players' kit bag.
And so to the motto to take from this double review? Don't judge a bat by the name (and don't think that just because it's named after one of the sources of a chilli pepper, it might taste like one too. I learned that lesson the hard way).
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