('Don's Century' is a book on the cricket career and life of Don Bradman, paying tribute to him in 2008, the year of his birth centenary. It is also a panorama of batting from the 1860s onwards featuring 35 of the greatest batsmen and discussing whether Don Bradman was indeed the greatest of them all).
Len
Hutton himself wrote at length about Bradman. He described his wide-eyed
admiration when as a boy he saw The Don score his triple century in a day at Leeds in 1930. Later he wrote in his Fifty Years in Cricket: “During his first visit to England in 1930
it was fashionable to say that The Don was unorthodox, a law unto himself, and
that his bat was not as straight as it ought to have been. A genius to confound
all theory, but not one to copy. Yet from Headingley onwards, and certainly
later when I was better able to judge, I never saw any part of his technique
which could not serve as a model for any batsman from school age upwards. His
movements were so right and so emphatic. To the straight good-length ball he
would either go forward or back with precise judgement, never across the pitch,
and at the crucial moment, his bat would be as straight as a Scotch fir.”
Someone
who played against Bradman at his zenith in 1930, and then watched him through
his career, K.S. Duleepsinhji, summed up his batting in Indian Cricketer Annual 1954: “Will there be another like him? I
doubt it - in our life time. They come so rarely. What is the secret of his
success? Cricket sense, extra quickness of eye, footwork, suppleness of wrist,
looseness of shoulders and correct timing. His highly developed cricket sense
helped him to make up his mind regarding the stroke in a split second, after
the ball left the bowler’s hand. Bradman was seldom at fault in judging the
correct position to play the stroke he intended to play. The suppleness of
wrists, looseness of shoulders and correct timing gave his strokes the great
speed with which he dispatched the ball to all corners of the field. The hook
shots, square-cuts, leg-glides off the balls on the leg-stump and pushes to the
on off balls on the wicket which he could execute with safety were due to the
combination of the above gifts. With his large repertoire of strokes, he always
found gaps in the field. The opponents always found eleven fielders too few.”
On
Bradman’s impact on the game, Duleepsinhji reflected, “Bradman during his
career caught the imagination of the public as only three others - W.G. Grace,
Ranji and Victor Trumper - succeeded in doing in the past. Where W.G. Grace
reeled off centuries, Bradman reeled off two and even three hundreds. Nearly
every batting record was smashed. Huge scores came off the modern factories
with Bill Ponsford setting the target. Where Ponsford left off, Bradman took
up. Totals of four hundred were considered not only safe but match-winning in
four-day Tests in England up
to 1930 when Bradman first came to England. How quickly that summer we
had to change our ideas, as Bradman began to reel off double centuries and once
309 in one day! No other country could produce a cricketer to match not only
his big scores, but the fast rate of his scoring which gave his bowlers plenty
of time to dismiss their opponents. ‘Bradman is batting’ - at those magic words
people would rush to the ground. More than once I noticed in Australia that if Bradman was not
out at lunch, five to ten thousand extra spectators would be on the ground when
the game was resumed.”
Alec
Bedser, who dismissed Bradman six times in Test matches, bowled to him only
after the war when the great man was past his prime, but still a rungetter
beyond compare. He wrote in the April 2001 issue of The Cricketer International: “My one regret was not to see him at
his peak when, as the great Test umpire Frank Chester told me, Bradman had to be
seen to be believed. Fielders were wont to whistle with astonishment at the
sheer brilliance and audacity of his stroke-play.”
“One
of his striking attributes,” added Bedser, “was the way he made full use of the
space from the popping crease to the stumps. At times when he played back he
almost trod on his wicket. When executing his deadly pull shot there were two
distinct movements: his right foot moved to outside the off-stump and his left
foot would move across to end in a perfect position to hit the ball on the
ground. It goes without saying that he kept his head perfectly still and
appeared to pick the length of the ball quicker than anyone else I was pitted
against. To add to his abundant gifts was a nerve that did not know the meaning
of the word temperament.” And that, one may repeat, was in the twilight of
Bradman’s career.
For
a true understanding of the Bradman phenomenon, it would be prudent to go back
to the First World War. Before 1914 England fielded their best team
only at home, where they won nine of the thirteen series. Australia’s
four triumphs were only by the odd game. In Australia, despite the depleted
English touring teams, the honours were even. England were the dominant force
until then.
The
war changed it all. As Peter Hartland wrote in The Balance of Power in Test Cricket 1877-1998, “The war had
claimed not only a million lives from the British Empire,
but also much of the energy, confidence and optimism of the period before. In
1921 people were already looking back to a Golden Age which could never return.
They still are.”
Warwick
Armstrong’s team whitewashed England
in Australia
in the first series after the war in 1920-21, but what the English could not
reconcile to was the three straight defeats at home in 1921, before the last
two Tests were drawn. On that tour, for the first time since Test cricket
began, Armstrong used a tactic which since then became routine: opening at both
ends with fast bowlers. His pacemen Jack Gregory and Ted McDonald settled the
issue for the all-conquering team.
There
was further humiliation for the English when Arthur Gilligan’s 1924-25 touring
side was trounced 4-1 by the Australians, now led by Herbie Collins. Just as
the sun had begun to set on the British Empire,
so also was their pre-eminence on the cricket field coming to an end. England
were no longer the paramount power in cricket either.
The
other feature was that advance in technology had put heavy rollers and mowing
machines in the hands of groundsmen, producing wickets that were over-prepared,
perfect for batting and not liable to deteriorate. Australian tracks were rock
hard with scarcely a blade of grass, which would remove the shine off the ball
very quickly. For three decades upto around 1950, batsmen revelled on these
pitches. It was a period of high scoring when all but the best bowlers were
rendered innocuous. Only when it rained, could they exact retribution on the
uncovered surfaces. Before the war three days of fair weather were adequate to
produce a result in a Test match. By 1930, the increasing number of high
scoring draws caused the duration of Tests to be increased to four days in England, with
the last Test played to a finish if the series was undecided at that stage. In Australia,
all Tests continued to be played to a finish.
Bradman
was brought up on wickets he could trust, and that bred confidence. This is
what Len Hutton emphasised, “Bradman had the considerable advantage of learning
his cricket on matting surfaces with a concrete base, and later to play on
bulli surfaces.” Duleepsinhji elaborated the point: “Bradman as a rungetter on
a good wicket had no superior. But he never made an effort to master the
difficult technique which is required to play on a sticky wicket. I can only
guess the reasons. Owing to the practice of covering wickets (during county
matches to cut losses), sticky wickets are rare and Bradman may have come to
the conclusion that perhaps no more than five per cent of his innings may be
played on sticky or wet wickets. Would it be worth his while to change his
style, successful on fast wickets, to suit a small number of innings on wet
wickets? The change in technique may easily reduce his phenomenal run-getting
powers on hard wickets. Taking some such argument into consideration, he must
have decided not to worry about a few failures on wet or sticky wickets and
keep to the technique which had brought such rich dividends on hard wickets.”
The
argument against Bradman was indeed that he was not as good a player on nasty
pitches as Trumper or Hobbs
were. It was also contended that he did not face much of genuinely fast and
hostile bowling as batsmen of the 1970s and 1980s did. Peter Hartland was of
the view that, “Whenever he did face it, notably during the Bodyline series, he
did not handle it as well as McCabe, nor as imperiously as Viv Richards has
done in more recent times.” It was even suggested that Bradman was not as far
superior to his contemporaries as W.G. Grace was at his peak.
It
can be nobody’s case that Bradman’s technique was ideal for any kind of wicket.
That honour can be taken by ‘the original master’ Jack Hobbs and ‘the little
master’ Sunil Gavaskar. In this category one could also include two other fine
opening batsmen, the Yorkshire technician Len Hutton and the first ‘little master’
Hanif Mohammad of Pakistan.
Yet
one look at the scorebooks, rate of scoring, and the combined effect of the two
on results of matches and series, only emphasises the point that such an
argument can at best be academic. To turn Wilfred Rhodes’ argument around - Hobbs averaged 56.94,
Bradman 99.94! Sir Neville Cardus put forward his argument with customary
finesse: “People say ‘Oh, but he hasn’t the charm of McCabe, or the mercury of
MacCartney, or the dignity of Hammond; the objection is a little unintelligent,
as though a lion was criticized for lacking the delicacy of the gazelle, the
worrying tenacity of the terrier and the disdainful elegance of a swan or a
camel.” Raymond Robertson-Glasgow had this to say, “About his batting, there
was no style for style’s sake. His aim was the making of runs, and he made them
in staggering and ceaseless profusion.”
Those
who point at Bodyline, and how Bradman’s average ‘plummeted’ to 56.57, it may
be said that it was the least he averaged in any Test series, but it was still
by far the best for Australia, and second only to England’s Eddie Paynter’s
61.33 with two not outs in five innings. It must also not be forgotten that
even in that series Bradman scored at almost 40 runs an hour, and 3.7 runs per
over, scoring a hundred in one Test and half-centuries in the other three.
McCabe might have been the more aesthetic while dealing with the scourge of
Bodyline, but Bradman was just as effective, and certainly more prolific and
consistent. And it should be noted that Bradman’s worst series, in trying
circumstances, was equal to what was normal for Hobbs and every other great. This fuss over
technique is purely theoretical. It reminds one of a case of recent times when
Sanjay Manjrekar got so obsessed with technique that he forgot that what
mattered more was the number of runs on the board, Geoff Boycott had a similar
fetish and even made himself unavailable for Tests to iron out certain flaws in
his play, ruthlessly exposed by the gentle left-arm slow-medium lollies of
Eknath Solkar.
Technique
was what the MCC coaching manual professed. Yet how many batsmen attain
copybook perfection, or even excellence. Vivian Richards did not, neither did
Brian Lara, but they were certainly far better batsmen than Geoff Boycott and Sanjay
Manjrekar, and more exhilarating by miles. Why, even the technically challenged
Virender Sehwag has a far better output, two Test triple hundreds and an
average over 50 in Tests.
Further,
what about those batsmen who commit the sacrilege of playing the upper cut, or
under cut if you prefer to call it that, the lap shot or the reverse sweep.
These shots have been developed, and played expertly, in modern cricket to
dominate bowlers and counter their ploys.
There
is no such thing as perfect technique. A good batsman’s technique varies with
the conditions, and no two batsmen have identical techniques. A technique is
like one’s fingerprint, patently one’s own, that complements one’s natural
ability to produce the best possible results. That is what Bradman did and it
yielded results like nothing seen before, or since. He was, as Raymond
Robertson-Glasgow put it, “The rarest of Nature’s creatures, an artist without
the handicap of the artistic temperament, a genius with an eye for business.”
Bradman
would sometimes say that just as Walter Lindrum needed good billiards tables to
make his biggest breaks, so do good batsmen need good wickets to put up big
scores. If the wickets were flat, they were so for everyone, not Bradman alone.
They certainly produced higher averages - men like Hobbs,
Sutcliffe, Hammond,
Headley and Hutton averaged between 56 and 61. Bradman averaged nearly 100.
This was the single-most important factor in the regaining of the Ashes in
1930, and the dominance of Australia
after the Bodyline series till the end of Bradman’s career in 1948.
Why
only technique, let’s talk about grace as well. Mark Waugh was arguably the
most elegant batsman in history, and a top quality Test player. But it was his
twin Steve, functional, even ungainly at times, who was the more effective and
successful, a folk hero. In textbooks, verse or
canvas, Hobbs
and Mark Waugh may, for some, be the best batsmen. At the crease it would have
to be Bradman. Ian Peebles once wrote in The
Cricketer International: “A first impression of Bradman was one of great
speed of action. This was epitomised in the extraordinary rapidity of his
advance to the pitch off slow bowlers. The move would be made late in the
flight of the ball but was firm and unhesitant and the feet twinkled. These
qualities characterised the whole performance. It was not the graceful flow of
Woolley or Hobbs,
but a sure, crisp and above all commanding exercise.”
Was
W.G. Grace better? Certainly, for a period between 1864 and 1873 at his very
best, he was reckoned to be twice as good as the next man. That, though, was
only in first-class cricket in England,
in the pre-Test match era. Later too he was one of the best, if not no. 1, of
his times, and he batted on wickets that even club players would recoil from
today. But those were the conditions
then, and he coped with them, just like men rode horses over mountains and
meadows before the age of automobiles that roll on roads of tarmac; and wrote
letters with pen and paper before the invention of e-mail.
There
is no ambiguity over the fact that right through his career, Bradman was nearly
twice as good as anyone else in Test matches as well as in first-class cricket,
in youth and in middle-age, on the hard bouncy wickets at home, and the
swinging and seaming conditions of England. The searing pace of Larwood and
Voce, the testing fast-medium wiles of Maurice Tate and Alec Bedser, and the
guile of top-quality spinners like Hedley Verity, Jim Laker and Vinoo Mankad came alike to
him. True, he batted a bit differently. Perhaps that is why he also got far
superior results. As Sir Pelham Warner, who in 1937 became the first cricketer
to be knighted, once quipped, “I believe Bradman would make a hundred in a
blackout.”
He
flayed not only English bowlers, but also those of the West Indies, South Africa and India. There is nothing to
suggest that he may not have scored as heavily had he played in these countries
too. For all we know Bradman might have been even more unfettered, as Lala
Amarnath averred. To dub The Don as merely a run-machine is simplistic for the
simple reason that machines do not have minds. They are switched on, and they
do their job efficiently. That’s it. Among Bradman’s several attributes was a
very strong mind. Cast your own mind back to the 1936-37 Ashes series at home.
He was returning to the Test arena after a near-death experience. He had just
been appointed captain of a weak team that had lost several stalwarts of the
past decade. And England
won the first two Tests. For most others it would have been too much to endure.
But The Don did something, well, Bradmanesque. He scored 270, 212 and 169 in
the remaining three Tests, winning all of them and retaining the crown. That
for me sums up Bradman, not just a run-machine, but the best batsman ever in
every conceivable way. Nothing daunted him, and his story is so hugely
inspirational as much for the massive odds he battled so successfully, as for
the phenomenal number of runs he made.
Or
let us fast forward to 1946-47, to the first series after the war. Unwell and
ageing, he carved out 187 and 234 in the first two Tests, winning both,
establishing ascendancy and breaking the English back. Maybe we can rewind at
bit further, to 1934. This was the first series after the Bodyline mayhem. The
Ashes had to be reclaimed and Bradman was not in good health. He still got his
customary double century in the opening match against Worcestershire. Then,
after having a lean run in the first three Tests and with the series
precariously placed at 1-1, The Don scored 304 and 244 in the last two Tests,
crucially winning the final one and wresting the Ashes. That was character, a
very tough mind and great skill, something far beyond the capability of any
machine ever invented. C.L.R. James put it succinctly, “The one thing that
strikes me - and I have seen Sir Donald play many times and make many hundreds
of runs - is the scientific, systematic manner in which he analyses the
danger.”
At
the end of the day, when the stumps are drawn, every cap around the arena has
to be doffed at this billionaire among millionaires, emperor among kings. He
shall remain that one guiding light for all succeeding batsmen to follow, the
ultimate benchmark against whom all great champions of the willow will be
judged.
One
of them, Sir Garfield Sobers made a telling observation: “A great player will
get the bowler to do what he wants him to do by his genius. He will improvise
and play unorthodox shots to defeat the field. Don Bradman did that and he was
the greatest of them all.” It was sometimes said of Bradman that he knew what
kind of delivery the bowler was going to send down. That was because he was
dictating to the bowler just what he wanted by the way he had dealt with the
deliveries before. Jack Fingleton said exactly that: “I heard prominent batsmen
of his era, cast deep into the shadows that Bradman got more full tosses and
long hops than anyone else. They were trying to suggest that Bradman was
fortunate. He wasn’t. The point was that bowlers were made by Bradman to bowl
to him as he wanted. He dictated that. His footwork, his abounding confidence,
his skill pulverised the bowlers and mesmerized them. They just didn’t know
where to bowl to him to keep him quiet.” Ray Robinson referred to Bradman's "knack of stopping bowlers from bowling well".
“He
towered above his fellows,” wrote Fingleton in his book Cricket Crisis on the Bodyline series, “he dominated the stage so
much that at one period it almost seemed that the game of cricket was
subservient to the individual Bradman…..”
What was that one quality that made Don Bradman such a
champion? Perhaps the one most qualified to shed light was his wife Jessie, who
once told the celebrated writer and former editor of Wisden, John Woodcock: “More than anything, it was his
single-mindedness; the ability to concentrate on any innings from the moment he
woke up in the morning.” The key word here is focus, and who better to
emphasise it than his own spouse. Let that remain the last word as well.
(Author Indra Vikram Singh can be contacted on email singh_iv@hotmail.com).
