We are ill-equipped to be just. We glorify those who leave their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. Consider who got the credit in the Bodyline Series: The undisputed victor of it with 33 wickets in the series and an impact that allowed other bowlers to pick up wickets after they had been softened up by him.
Or was it the batsman who made a hue and cry that he wasn’t fed balls that were to his liking and thus his average came down? Who came out of Bodyline with his image tarnished and his life and his career destroyed? And who came out with rules changed and assurances given that he would never be subjected to such hostile bowling again?
Larwood’s story though must give us hope in the Universe’s sense of justice as no matter what you say about his tragedy his triumph completely dwarfs it. To see that one needs to consider the last Test of his career, the Test he didn’t want to play as the series was already won and the physical pounding his body had taken was severe. Larwood pleaded with his captain to be left out of the final Test in Sydney. Jardine did not budge and said, “We’ve got the bastards down there, and we’ll keep them there.” Jardine’s determination to humiliate Bradman over-rode any consideration of what Larwood wanted. And that was the end of Larwood the Test cricketer. The heavens though gave him a parting gift. And this is how that Test opens up in front of my eyes from the surreal distance of 78 years.
Physically spent having bowled his heart out for five months and emotionally battered having faced a hostile crowd throughout Australia, Nottinghamshire’s Harold Larwood took the field in the final Bodyline Test. In a bizarre and ironical quirk of fate Larwood limped off the field when Bradman was dismissed in the second innings of the Test and then lost his gift of pace forever. There was some poetic justice in his fate though as he couldn’t have asked for anything more on that last day of his short Test career. There was absolutely-nothing left for him to prove in the game. He had scored 50 runs more than the player considered by many as the greatest batsman to have ever graced the game in England’s first innings of the Test batting at number four.
Larwood made 98 runs in 148 balls with 10 fours and a six and combined with Wally Hammond for a 92-run partnership for the third wicket—the fifth-highest partnership of the match—and took England from 153 for two to 245 for three, where Hammond departed. Larwood then combined with Maurice Leyland for the fourth-wicket stand of 65 that took the score to 310 for four in pursuit of Australia’s 435 all out. England finished their innings with a 19-run first innings lead.
Earlier, in Australia’s first innings when the world’s greatest batsman Sir Donald Bradman got out Australia slumped to 64 for three with Bradman having made a sparkling 48 of them. All three Australian wickets to fall belonged to Larwood—actually Larwood had a hand in the first four wickets to fall as he took a catch off the bowling of his hunting partner Bill Voce to reduce Australia to 163 for four.
Vic Richardson had opened the innings with Australian captain Bill Woodfull and Larwood had Richardson caught by Douglas Jardine in the fifth ball of the first over for a duck. Larwood then shattered the stumps for his next two wickets and had Woodfull, on a patient 14, and Bradman, on a quick-fire 48, clean bowled. Before he came out and made that precious 98, the bowling figures of Larwood in Australia’s first innings were 32.2 overs, 10 maidens, 98 runs, and four wickets. The first innings show was started and ended by Larwood as he took the first as well as the last Australian wicket to fall.
In the second innings Australia were all out for 182 with Larwood taking just one wicket but significantly again in the first over of the innings thus ensuring a unique pair for Australia and Vic Richardson as both could not get off the mark or even play out the first over of the match in either innings without losing a wicket. England took a walk in the park to complete an eight wicket win that sealed the series 4-1 in its favour. Importantly, in achieving all this England did not break any existing law of the game of cricket. Now I do understand that the law is an ass, yet given a choice I would prefer it any day over lawlessness.
In old age, Larwood would describe what he did with the bat rather than the ball as his ‘greatest moment in Test cricket’. England had bowled out Australia for 435, and the footsore Larwood wanted nothing more than to soak his weary bones in the bath. Jardine ordered him to put on his pads and go in as nightwatchman. ‘I couldn’t understand it,’ said Larwood. ‘I’d bowled my guts out… I was angry. I didn’t want to go in. If it was necessary, I was determined to get out.’
“In later years when visiting members of the England tour party called at his home in Australia, Larwood talked them through his innings at the SCG as if he had just returned from the crease: how he’d batted shortly before the close and wanted to throw away his wicket in protest at Jardine’s decision; how Bradman ought to have run him out, but wildly missed the stumps because he tried to hit them directly, the ball skidding off to the boundary; and how the crowd rose to a man and gave him a standing ovation at its end.
The reluctant nightwatchman was still fuming with indignation at Jardine’s decision the following morning and decided to attack wholly ‘on spleen’. He didn’t care where the ball went. As the Australian bowler ‘Bull’ Alexander—as fast as Voce but inaccurate—tried to bounce him out, the Hill yelled at him to ‘knock the bastard’s head off’. Larwood, with five runs overnight, stood straight and hooked and pulled without fear. The scoreboard ticked on like a taxi meter.
Larwood cut and drove and thought about his coach Jimmy Iremonger. ‘A lot of the runs were his,’ he said. ‘I remembered how he taught me to bat.’ Moving beyond 50, his stroke-play became more cavalier, like a man in a sword fight. His partner Maurice Leyland walked up the pitch to calm him down. ‘You’re 98,’ he said to Larwood, who had no idea his century was so close that he could reach out and touch it. He had been playing instinctively, striking the ball freely and blocking out the jeers and crowd noise. But Leyland’s well-meaning intervention broke his concentration.
For the first time in his innings, he began to think about his shot selection. He planned to on-drive the next ball to the picket fence. The prospect of a hundred caused him to delay the stroke fatally, checking it instead of attacking. It went to the worst Australian fielder Bert Ironmonger. To Ironmonger’s utter astonishment, and everyone else’s, he didn’t drop it.
After his improbable cameo he peeled off his gloves and waved his bat in the air in gratitude. The cheering for the innings still hadn’t died away by the time Larwood unbuckled his pads and flopped on the bench next to his kit. ‘I went to sleep that night with the roar in my ears,’ he said.
Larwood was also a refined collector of his own memorabilia and a special one for him was a picture from the final Bodyline Test in 1933. “The picture shows Bradman struck for the only time during the series. A skidding ball hasn’t climbed as high as Bradman expected. As the shutter clicks, Bradman has his back to the camera. He is bent at the waist and has begun to fall away behind the stumps. The bat remains gripped in his left hand. Larwood has written plainly: ‘Bradman, trying all sorts of shots to combat the leg-side attack.’”
“Newspaper reports claimed that Larwood struck him on the forearm. Not so, said Larwood. Those privileged enough to be given the photograph to examine were asked the rhetorical question: ‘You know where I got Bradman?’ There’d be a well-rehearsed pause before he’d lean forward and deliver his punchline: ‘On the arse.’ No matter how many times he recounted that story, Larwood always laughed, as though telling it for the first time.”
After all what did England do in the series apart from using the fast bowlers they had at their disposal just like Bradman did when he had Ray Lindwall and Keith Miller later. Australia did that when they had fast bowlers around 12 or so years earlier. I don’t buy the helmet crap that Michael Atherton dished out in one of his articles. Richards played without the helmet and Gavaskar did at a time when every major Test nation had genuine fast bowlers; apart from the team Gavaskar played for. Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson in their time were much more hostile and one of them even said that he loved seeing blood on the field. Bradman was a cricket administrator then and if he really believed in the charge he levelled against England then how could a bowler get away with a specific remark like seeing blood on the field.
When Larwood saw them bowl he was quick to observe that they had bowled more bouncers in a day then he did in a full season. Then why was Bodyline singled out? The reason was simple: As Bradman, the champion of the years after the Great Depression, had to be spotless it was important that the series itself was blackened out.
At one stage including the next season, 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. Wisden wrote: “…there were many occasions on which he 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.”
Fast forward to the last Test of Bradman at the Oval in 1948. He was the captain of the team that later got crowned as ‘The Invincibles’ and Bradman was celebrated wherever he went unlike the abuse that had accompanied Larwood. It was evening time when Bradman walked out to the crease needing just four runs to have an average of hundred runs per innings. And at The Oval he played his most well-remembered innings. The headline of a piece on the innings by Bryon Coverdale just says, ‘God’s own blob’.
“It remains one of cricket’s great ironies that Don Bradman’s most universally remembered innings is one in which he utterly failed. His 0 at The Oval in 1948 is without question the most famous duck in the game’s history. Every cricket fan knows the significance of Bradman’s nought: it was his final Test innings and he needed four runs to finish with a career average of 100.
“It looked to me as though he had decided it was a legbreak, and that he would let the ball turn away from him,” Hollies wrote later. “However, (it was the googly) and the ball turned in just enough to pass the edge of his bat and hit the middle and off stumps.” The former editor of the Wisden Cricket Monthly Stephen Fay in a section called ‘The Best I’ve Watched’ wrote a piece called ‘Donald gets a duck’: “Bradman’s monumental duck meant that his Test average was stuck on 99.94. For myself, I felt very glad he was gone but extremely sorry not to have watched him bat. As he trudged back to the pavilion, Bradman confessed that he had “rather a sad heart”. (Note the “rather”.) In the press box, Jack Fingleton and Bill O’Reilly, two of Bradman’s old team-mates, were laughing.”
God does have a sense of humour.
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