Australian writer Gideon Haigh in one of his articles said: “Some day in our lifetimes, the last person to have seen Sir Donald Bradman bat in a Test match will pass away. It may not be marked, like the deaths of the last survivors of the Titanic or the first day of the Somme, but in cricket’s terms it will be as significant.”
Bradman knew this and he also knew that the average argument could be punctured easily and that is why in his later years he became neurotic in defending his batting during the Bodyline Series. Cricket’s pre-eminent historian David Frith in his seminal work Bodyline Autopsy said: “It helped to have known many of the cricketers who took part in those matches, and I was glad also to have some input from Gilbert Mant, the last of the journalists who covered the tour. It was he who passed on the most astonishing revelation of all: the name of the player who leaked Bill Woodfull’s forceful protest to the England manager during that stormy Adelaide Test match.”
This is what Rob Steen said about the book: “No detail is left unturned. Even the state matches are brought to life. The source of the dressing-room leak at Adelaide is examined in especially revealing fashion. Bradman, despite decades of denial, emerges as Prince Machiavelli.” The Don’s embittered team mate Jack Fingleton is quoted in the final paragraph: “I think, looking back, the Australians perhaps made too much fuss about it (Bodyline).”
Bradman played six innings in three tour games before the first Bodyline Test and made a total of 103 runs at an average of 17.16 with 36 as his highest score. He complained to the Australian Board even before the Tests had started and then in mysterious circumstances missed the first Test in Sydney.
Douglas Jardine maintained that Bradman had an acute attack of nerves due to enormous Australian expectations; his running dispute with the Board about a contract to write for Sydney’s Sun, and, of course, the prospect of facing Larwood.
In the three Tests that mattered he made 293 runs at an average of 48.83. He made an unbeaten 103 in the second innings in Melbourne to go with his first-ball duck but crucially again with Larwood in no position to bowl in that essay due to bleeding feet. Was this an aberration or was this the only competitive series the Don ever played in?
The impact of the Bodyline Series went well into the next season despite the absence of Larwood. Wisden wrote: “There were many occasions on which he (Bradman) was out to wild strokes. Indeed at one period he created the impression that, to some extent, he had lost control of himself and went in to bat with an almost complete disregard for anything in the shape of a defensive stroke.
“At one stage, Bradman went 13 first-class innings without a century, the longest such spell of his career, prompting suggestions that Bodyline had eroded his confidence and altered his technique. After three Tests, the series was one-one and Bradman had scored 133 runs in five innings.”
One fast bowler in his prime cut Bradman’s average of the previous series down by almost 60%. Was Bodyline unsporting and contrary to the spirit of cricket? Two batsmen got injured in the third Test at Adelaide and both of them due to their own mistakes as can be seen on YouTube – neither ball was bowled to a leg-side field and Woodfull was a slow-mover and Oldfield made a horrible misjudgment to pull a ball at Larwood’s pace to leg-side from a foot outside off and he immediately clarified that it wasn’t Larwood’s fault.
Harold Larwood got 33 wickets in the series and some of the other fast bowlers who accompany him in taking that many in a series are Curtly Ambrose, Jeff Thomson, Alan Davidson, Allan Donald, Malcolm Marshall, Colin Croft, and Sir Richard Hadlee. Tell a fast bowler that 33 wickets can be had by only bowling leg stump bouncers and then be prepared for his anger and his assault.
In timeless matches Larwood had to make the batsman play to get wickets and not waste his energy by bowling a bouncer every ball. It was later said that he bowled less in the series than what Dennis Lillie and Jeff Thompson bowled in a day. The problem with Bodyline was that Bradman had to be spotless and therefore the entire series was blackened out.
Simon Barnes holds the unique distinction of being the journalist to define the whole series in just one line: “Bodyline is the longest whinge in sporting history.”
The helmet argument: Gavaskar played without them when West Indies unleashed one fast bowler after the other in an era when cricket was a war zone and some 40 batsmen were sent to the hospital. He made 13 hundreds against them at an average that was 15 runs higher than his overall one. Average doesn’t take into account the quality of the attack that a batsman has scored against.
Bradman’s comparison with Tendulkar is a facile exercise and Sehwag is the only right parallel. The amount of cricket and mass adulation that blighted the punctuated career of Bradman with mysterious illnesses is the amount Tendulkar plays every five years and God save him if privacy is also one of his concerns. Tendulkar may well hang his boots having played nearly four times the Test cricket that Bradman played and top it up with an unbelievable and equally immense One Day career.
Bradman gave his game away when he came out with that beautiful story from his home in Adelaide. “Sir Donald Bradman was watching a 1996 World Cup match on television when he first saw Sachin Tendulkar bat. The Indian player’s technique seemed strangely familiar. The Australian called his wife into the living room of their suburban Adelaide home. ‘Who does this remind you of?’ asked Bradman, then 87. The answer was obvious. ‘I never saw myself play,’ Bradman said later. ‘But I feel that this player is playing much the same [way] I used to play.’
What is Bradman trying to say here? Is he implying that the average of 99.94 is achieved by playing like this and so the equivalent of that in the modern era is somewhere over 56. You have to completely misunderstand Bradman the man and credulously believe Bradman the legend in order to swallow that.
What is the one line that Bradman could not eradicate from his cricketing life and sits on almost every summary page you read about him: “Though his batting was not classically beautiful, it was always awesome.” If you dig deep it is scattered around his knocks everywhere like clues at a crime scene. Bradman could not have been unaware of it and you can’t give him the benefit of doubt here because there are instances that show how zealously he guarded his legacy.
See this interaction with David Frith. “He once took me to task for writing that he bowled Wally Hammond out with a full-toss at Adelaide in 1933. ‘It was not a full-toss!’ But five or six participants in that Test match, including Hammond himself, had declared it a full-toss. And I discovered – too late – that Don himself had spoken of it as such in his radio summary very soon after the incident. Amazingly, all these years later, he seemed to regard the bowling of a full-toss as a symptom of defective character. I loved him for it.”
Bradman was greedy to the hilt and this comparison he made shows that he wanted all that he could have. Bradman was not elevating Tendulkar, in fact, he was trying to obliterate all anecdotal evidence about himself. Does Tendulkar from any angle look like an unorthodox player without beauty in his stroke play? Bradman was not copybook as far as looking elegant is concerned. Tendulkar is better than copybook and even his wild innovations look beautiful.
Bradman had the average and what he badly needed was a model, so he chose the most-perfect and compact and perhaps the most-beautiful run-getter in the history of the game to serve his purpose. What he meant was that he got his runs at an average of 99.94 playing like Tendulkar does. And someday there would come a time when the last man to have watched him bat would pass away but what will remain forever is the way Tendulkar has got his runs. The Don was trying to perpetrate and preserve a false legacy.
He gave it another tweak and expressed surprise on learning that Tendulkar had been coached, when he had invited the Little Master to his home in Adelaide during end-1990s, as he thought that Tendulkar like himself was a complete natural. So despite watching all his innings for a few years the Don did not bother to check anything about the player he compared to himself and later invited to his home. The life of Bradman shows he was never so casual about anything – especially not about his cricket.
To judge Bradman you have to first see that he has a very small sample and therefore each observation matters as it affects the spread significantly. You have to put aside his average against the minnows South Africa, India and the West Indies and then count the innings where he played at least one world-class bowler. Hardly four or five bowlers who bowled to Bradman stand out in the history of the game.
Don’t underestimate the LBW law as in Bradman’s time you could only be given out if the ball pitched and hit in line with the stumps and then went on to hit them. This automatically rules out the in-swinger, the in-cutter, and the off-spinning deliveries that pitch outside but come in enough to hit in line. This is as potent a weapon for the bowler as the catch or even more as you can pad up to any ball outside off and get away. The batsman also gets the advantage when he is unsure which way the ball would go as he can again pad up and nullify the in-coming as well as the out-going delivery. Bradman was out leg before just six times in his career. The argument that he was so good that he was rarely struck in front of the wicket does not hold as he was bowled 23 times. Tendulkar has played around two dozen bowlers who can lay a good claim to being in the list of the forty odd all-time best bowlers on wickets suiting them and made hundreds. What was said about Tendulkar during his early years?
His maiden effort in Australia at Lismore when he was just 18 didn’t go unnoticed and 1,500 people saw it. “Conditions were grey overhead and green underfoot, which made predicting the ball’s flight path tricky. The bowling was top-shelf—Whitney, Lawson, Holdsworth, Matthews, Waugh, Waugh—and the batting a little gormless, all except for the one who was 18.
Under the Oakes Oval pines he took careful guard, his head still, his footsteps like tiny, precise pinpricks, going backwards mostly, unless the bowler overpitched. Fifteen hundred people saw this, the great Alan Davidson among them. Davo was dumbfounded: “It’s just not possible… such maturity. Tendulkar hit 82 that afternoon, when no one else passed 24, then 59 out of 147 in the second innings.” Christian Ryan wrote.
When Allan Donald first bowled to Tendulkar in an ODI at Eden Gardens he said “that it was blatantly clear that he was going to be a player to remember”. He rated him the number one in his book and said that it is freakish to be so balanced at the crease.
Tendulkar didn’t have an average at 16 when people all across the world were lining up to see him and when Australian journalist Mark Ray was lingering around India’s net sessions during his first trip to watch the boy wonder bat. Neither did Bradman have an average after his first Test but he was picked for the third. Players are not selected on averages and though it has, like net profit for a company, become the gold standard to judge cricketers it is just as misleading as relying on a sole figure to learn about the business of a company. Tendulkar would never equate himself or place himself higher than the Don but then playing oneself down and not even knowing what one has is an unmistakable sign of real greatness.
Frith paid Bradman the ultimate compliment, “Bradman was not one in a million,” he said. “He was much rarer.” Despite a following that runs into thousands of millions, the tribute for Tendulkar is qualitatively-different and the essence of it is wonderfully captured by that Matrix line immortalized by Lana and Andy Wachowski: “He is the One.”
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