Young Bradman

103 Bradman or machine? Fender: I don’t mind being criticised for my style of play, but I wasn’t very enthusiastic about him saying that I didn’t look as though I was trying to correct anything, or didn’t want to correct anything, and when we played against Surrey I was aware of what he said, and so I thought, I would like to do well against Surrey today … Bradman made 252 not out at The Oval on 24 May, his seventh three-day match in 25 days. Tate, as Bradman recalled in his 1930s autobiography, had taken Bradman aside in Australia, and whispered in a friendly way: ‘Don, learn to play straighter before you come to England. If you don’t you won’t get many runs.’ Tate must have told others, because Bradman recalled the wicket-keeper George Duckworth telling Tate during Bradman’s 334: ‘I thought you said you could get him out in England off that cross-bat shot, Maurice? When are you going to start?’ In Wisden in 1931, SJ Southerton found fault, with Bradman’s back play, with a ‘vertical bat’, in defence: ‘And this is where he had his limitations for the tour proved that when he met a bowler either left hand or right who could make the ball just go away he never seemed quite such a master as against off break or straight fast bowling.’ Even the tribute to Bradman as one of Wisden ’s five cricketers of the year noted that judges disagreed over his footwork; the almanack suggested that Bradman still had something to learn on a turning wicket. Wisden , too, felt the need to judge him against men of the past, Trumper and Macartney, and mark him down on ‘grace of style’. Bradman had scored twice as many runs as any other 1930 tourist, in a few more innings it was true. He averaged 98.66 in first-class matches, compared with the next highest, Kippax, with 58. What did a man have to do, to be free of criticism?! At least the critics only had to watch him. Four years later, when much had changed, Douglas Jardine was reporting on the next series in England for the London Evening Standard . On Bradman’s ‘great innings’ of 304 at Leeds in July 1934, Jardine wrote that Bradman ‘showed all the machine-like consistency of 1930’. After Bradman’s 334 at Leeds in 1930, an Australian journalist asked England captain Percy Chapman for his opinion; he replied ‘in two words’. Bradman was imposing himself on a game that many older men were mourning. In his 1936 memoir The King of Games , Frank Woolley felt that for some seasons cricket had been ‘on the down path’; Fred Root began his 1937 book A Cricket Pro’s Lot regretting that cricket was not ‘anything like so good as it was 30 or 40 years ago’. Like others before and since, they may have been confusing the world’s decline with their own. They had a point; cricket was reaching the end of its apostolic era. The later Victorians, who made the county and international cricket that had become routine by the 1930s, were dying. Belief in the 20 years before 1914 as a ‘golden age’ became all the more powerful because it was untrue; as the Kent wicket- keeper JC Hubble pointed out in 1921, crowds had been dwindling, and counties in debt; professional players had wanted more pay, and much of the play had been tedious. The 1914-18 war, which spoiled so much,