It is the slow-motion replay that TV directors know is guaranteed to draw a reaction, no matter how often it happens. There is no moment in cricket that creates the same combination of sympathy and schadenfreude from those that know how it feels as a batsman being hit in the box by a fast bowler. It is typically followed by the batsman collapsing to the ground.
Most recreational cricketers will have heard the well-worn joke that men took a century to realise that the brain is just as important as the balls, since the box was developed over 100 years before the helmet. Yet where the helmet has evolved beyond recognition, most boxes, or abdominal guards, look relatively similar to those used in the 1970s, with a hard plastic shell surrounded by some foam padding.
But at Lord's this week, an improbable rivalry will play out between two start-up brands competing to protect the genitals of New Zealand's cricketers: Cover, co-founded by Kane Williamson, and TruGuard, developed by Mitchell Santner's younger brother Elliot and Otago's Ruben Clinton. England's seam bowlers will relish the chance to put both products to the test and should have ample opportunity, with several Black Caps players using them.
Both boxes are the result of traumatic experiences of the sort that may cause male readers to wince - and to react differently when they next see a replay of a batter getting hit where it hurts. One compilation of Liam Livingstone being struck repeatedly in a Big Bash game has nearly five million views on YouTube, but for many players the impact is long-lasting and the injuries sustained are gruesome.
Williamson's experience is the one negative memory of his first Test hundred on home soil, a fourth-innings rearguard against South Africa in 2012. On 9, he was struck flush by a 139kph nip-backer from Dale Steyn that cracked his box in half; over a decade later, it still sits framed on Williamson's mantlepiece, signed by Steyn. Thankfully, he did not suffer any severe injuries.
Williamson clearly took the blow in good humour, but it woke him up to the fact that the protection he was using was inadequate. Other players clearly felt similarly: Faf du Plessis, for example, created a protector he dubbed the Beast by taping three standard boxes together. "I'm one of the guys that gets hit in the nuts probably the most in the world," he said at the time, and that he could not find a better solution.
Clinton, a batting allrounder who has also played for MI New York in MLC, suffered a different issue altogether when he was hit: the box remained intact, but the organs it was supposed to protect did not. "It didn't crack, it didn't split, it didn't even fold," Clinton says. "It's just that no energy was absorbed. All of that force was transferred into my testicles."
His testicular torsion - the same injury sustained by India's Tilak Varma earlier this year, where blood supply is cut off by twisting - required surgery. Like with Williamson, it prompted him to think more seriously about protection. Clinton approached his old team-mate Santner, a mechanical engineer and club cricketer. Together, over several years and at considerable personal expense, they designed the TruGuard, which is now distributed by a company called Aero.
The two products are notably distinct solutions to the same problem, informed by their founders' experiences. While Cover's box features shock-absorbing foam, its most distinctive feature is its firmness: it is made primarily from an aluminium alloy designed to be as robust as possible, avoiding the cracking that Williamson experienced. "It is metal composite," Grant Elliott, Williamson's former New Zealand team-mate, and now Cover's commercial lead, says. "It is resilient, and it's tough."
By contrast, the TruGuard is made from plastic, but uses a "gyroid lattice" structure - "You could visualise it like a honeycomb," Santner says - to absorb the shock of impact across a wide surface area.
Santner, who works as a mechanical engineer and, like his older brother, is a spin-bowling allrounder, says that the TruGuard absorbs at least five times more force than a traditional box. It is deliberately larger than a regular box, too. "Pretty much every box out there doesn't have internal volume," Clinton says. "Unless you're very unlucky, you need a little bit more space than that."
Both products launched in the past year and have already been worn extensively in top-level cricket, including by Williamson and the older Santner brother. Clinton estimates that there are at least 60 professional players using TruGuards, including the whole Otago squad, while Cover made its way to the IPL thanks to Williamson's involvement as a strategic advisor at Lucknow Super Giants.
It received an instant, in-game testimonial in mid-April, when Mitchell Marsh was struck flush in the box by Josh Hazlewood. Marsh immediately gestured towards Williamson in the LSG dugout with a thumbs-up, confirming that the box had done its job as advertised. "It's just great to see world-class players using it and putting trust in our product," Elliott, who joined Cover earlier this year, says.
Marsh knows the importance of protection better than most. At the T20 World Cup earlier this year, where he was due to captain Australia, he suffered internal testicular bleeding after being struck in the nets. The injury ruled him out of their first two games, including a shock defeat to Zimbabwe. "Cover would've saved Australia's T20 World Cup," Elliott says, perhaps only half-joking.
TruGuard's marketing has relied heavily on social media: their TikToks and Instagram reels include Clinton repeatedly hitting himself in the box with a hammer, and Santner smacking him with a cricket bat as he narrates a video about the brand. They are also working with several internationals outside New Zealand, including South Africa's Tony de Zorzi and Lhuan-dre Pretorius.
Neither product comes cheap: Cover's box retails at around US$72, or US$96 bundled with a jockstrap, while the TruGuard is priced at US$96 for just the box, with a jockstrap in development. They are both available in New Zealand, Australia, and a handful of other markets, and there are plans to expand worldwide soon.
They are premium products, therefore, but both companies are bullish about their potential. Elliott believes that better abdominal protection could change the way the game is played in the same way that helmets once did. "A player who is looking at coming on board as an investor said to me, 'This might actually get guys to open their hips up more at the death,'" he says.
Clinton agrees. "The modern game is so different to what it was," he says. "Nowadays you spend 50% of the time literally front-on, so the chance of you getting hit is so much higher. You are now expected to hit it off a [groin-high] length, and to be able to ramp both ways. [The question we asked was] how can we give you the most amount of confidence to do that?"
It remains to be seen whether the advancement of abdominal protection will change the game altogether, but one thing is for sure: if a New Zealand batter is struck this week, there will be more interest in his reaction - and his box - than ever before.