If you’re a bat geek (that’s as in willow rather than Bruce Wayne) you might know that Kookaburra’s bat the ‘Beast’ was recently deemed illegal by MCC, the arbiter of cricket’s Laws, because it had a graphite strip down the back of the blade.

Ricky Ponting is the most high-profile user of the ‘Beast’ so he promptly ditched it and has been using one of Kookaburra’s other models in Australia’s Test in Cape Town.

So it was interesting to observe that Owais Shah, England’s sixth debutant in six Tests, used what looked to untrained observers like me the self-same ‘Beast’ while making a fifty in Mumbai before retiring hurt today.

I raised the issue with a colleague who in turn raised it with Angus Fraser, wearer of many hats including member of the ICC’s cricket committee that has jurisdiction over this kind of thing. He was sceptical. He didn’t think ICC had banned it in international cricket. He thought there was a moratorium while Kookaburra batsmen got themselves sorted. To settle the argument, he phoned Dave Richardson, ICC’s cricket manager, who told Fraser that batsmen had been given “a reasonable amount of time” to replace their ‘Beasts’. Shah had come straight to India from an England A tour in West Indies and, it is fair to assume, not expected to play in a Test. So presumably he has not had “reasonable time” to get a new batch of bats in.

But being mischievous, I phoned our man in Cape Town, Ed Craig, and suggested he asked Ponting’s opinion on the matter. I suspected that the Australian captain might be more bothered about going 1-0 up in a three-Test series in South Africa but I was wrong.

Ponting was asked: “Isn’t it ironic that Owais Shah was using the banned bat today making his Test debut after all the fuss made about your bat?”

Ponting replied: “Well, he can’t use it he’ll be suspended. He scored 50 today using that bat, really? Guess what I’m using in Durban then! It was supposed to be banned as of the 12th of this month, which was the last one-day game the other day. That was all the feedback I received from Kookaburra and everybody else.”

Ed continued: “He’s retired hurt at the moment, do reckon he should be allowed back in?” “With a different bat, maybe, yeah,” Ponting laughed.

To paraphrase the old Heineken adverts: only cricket can do this. A Law ought to be definitive, oughtn’t it? Probably. But it’s only a piece of wood and who would begrudge a guy who’s waited the best part of ten years a fifty on Test debut?