Young Bradman

114 game degenerates into a telling of beads’. Bradman, by making his record scores in Australia and then England, was so unsettling because as the greatest ‘proficient’ of all he called into question the very balance between bat and ball that was the essence of cricket. Another bowler against Bradman at Worcester in 1930 – in his final first- class match, in fact – was Humphrey Gilbert, who in 1924 complained in the Observer about how Lord’s was coaching boys. Gilbert had heard that youths could not lift or swing their bats, ‘and that actually mechanical means are employed which seem in effect to prevent his doing so’. The MCC coaches were teaching every batsman to play the same way: ‘I wonder how many Palairets and RE Fosters they are ruining,’ Gilbert asked, naming two of the most stylish batsmen before 1914. ‘Why try to reduce everyone to the same miserable level?’ English cricket could not agree on what to teach, and why they were teaching. In his novel That Test Match , Sir Home Gordon had a school games-master tell the schoolboy Paul Rignold, ‘it isn’t the runs you get, but how you get them which matters’. The South African player turned coach Aubrey Faulkner said the opposite in The Cricketer in 1928. The object of batting was ‘to make runs whenever possible … the next year or two ought to prove conclusively whether the methods adopted at the Faulkner school of cricket are the right ones or not!’. In 1930 he gassed himself. Faulkner was barking up the wrong tree; what mattered was not who was right, but who stood on each side, to decide what was in fashion. Enough people insisted that style mattered, and Bradman lacked it. Fender in his 1930 book called Bradman ‘a mechanical genius’: and no matter to what heights he may rise in the production of record breaking figures one will always have to admire him far more from the point of view of his accuracy and his precision than for his grace and style or the versatility of his stroke play. More even-handed was RC Robertson-Glasgow. Before Bradman’s time in 1924 he stuck up for ‘modern’ cricket, that is, the players of his day. Style in batting, in the sense of what batsmen generally did, had changed in the previous 50 years - from playing forward, to playing back and defending more with the pads, for ‘the elimination of error’. Style in the sense of what people found attractive was a matter of opinion. Thus an anonymous reporter for the Times at Lord’s in August 1925 could find interesting George Gunn’s ‘mechanical stroke’ to leg from a short ball, ‘because he played it with the delicacy and crispness of a billiard player scoring in the middle pocket’, until he missed one and was leg before. These umpires of taste were judging the cricket they saw like poetry that AE Housman defined in a 1933 lecture: as an object that you recognised, ‘and by the symptoms it provokes in us’. CLR James made much the same point when arguing for cricket as art, in his famed book Beyond a Boundary . The trouble was that so few were as open-minded as Robertson-Glasgow, to even admit that there were more ways of looking at the world than your own, let alone that others might be right. The same went for politics; Bradman or machine?