These are the absolute cheapest available (to us in the UK) lacrosse glove around. Okay, firstly what I do like is yes, they are noticably smaller and more slimline than the Brine gloves, also very comfortable and nice to wear with lovely swede and mesh palm, ventilation is lovely.
In terms of flexibility, they are awesome, as the wrist doesn't join together, it has a tie cord, so you have the cuff nice and lose and therefore not restrictive at all, they also look really cool and the price is obviously exceptionally good for what they are. So with all that in mind, the only thing to really discuss is protection.
These literally just turned up so haven't been tried in sparring yet, but I have done enough sparring and used enough types of gloves to give a pretty good review already. The brine gloves are built so that ever section of them is plated with presumably a tough plastic plate with padding underneath, which is very effective, these gloves do not have any plates anywhere at all, all protection is provided by high density foams. This means inevitably they are not going to provide as much protection but still provide a lot.
Protection to the back of the hand, wrist and join between thumb and hand are all excellent. Yes that is a ventilation hole in the middle of the back of the hand, either you will have to fill this, or use tipped weapons. Okay onto the finger/thumb protection, obviously the protection is not from overlapping plates like the brines, but it is very closely constructed. The finger and thumb protection is much better than revival kevlar sparring gloves, but not anywhere near as good as the Brine Supercross. Additionally the brine supercrosse have curved plates in on the fingers which wrap partially around the finger sides and tip, a feature not seen with these.
My feelings on these gloves is that they are a big step up from hockey gloves or revival kevlar gloves and similar type stuff. I think as is they are an excellent starting cheap glove, but are not quite good enough for the higher levels of contact steel sparring. I do believe they could be modified and adapted for this purpose though.
Really I only have two reservations about these gloves and therefore two things I would improve to use them for regular heavy steel sparring, that would be the fingers themselves, adding plastic plates to the finger or equivelent, and the tips themselves (including thumb), pad or plate the tips. Lastly i ordered the size 12, same as my Brines, they are a perfect fit for my fairly average medium sized hands, some may want the 13" if they were to add extra protection inside the fingers, maybe not.
In conclusion, these do not replace the role of the Brine gloves, they are an excellent beginners/starting glove for steel sparring and are great for the money, probably also excellent for nylon/plastic sparring, but for regular heavy sparring use, I still haven't found the replacement for the Brines, of which I just ordered 12 pairs for our club members.
