Young Bradman

116 the 1914-18 war, ‘that chills even the spirit of our glorious Hammond, and transforms him into an automatic, if beautiful, machine!’. As Cardus hinted, Hammond was one of the most admired batsmen of his time. Cardus and his kind never seemed to have the self-awareness that they were as machine-like as the cricketers; reporters had to write so many words by deadline, whether the play was worth writing about or not. Cardus may have had a point, even though he was laughably badly informed, judging players based on the reports of others, without pictures, 12,000 miles away; perhaps the very absurdity of it spurred him on, or was Cardus too sure of himself to ever have doubts?! With experience, self- taught batsmen like Hammond and Bradman became more like others; rather than deaden, the routine of repeated movements made them look smoother, as a river scours its bends. If we do something regularly – clean our teeth, drive to work – we can do it without conscious thought. This serves a purpose at cricket, when a batsman does not have the time to choose a stroke. In a newspaper article in his name in June 1929, Harold Larwood recalled how he had to find his correct run-up, in ‘distance and style’: There was no satisfaction until I became automatically perfect. So perfect in fact that when the wicket was slightly damp my footsteps were plainly to be seen and every time I stepped in exactly the same places. As the proverb said, practice made Larwood perfect; it freed his brain to think of other details. In a preview in April 1930, the Times recalled that the earliest Australian teams ‘contained few batsmen of polished skill’. The metaphor of polishing suited Bradman. An anonymous, early judge of his batting described him as ‘rough as bags’. Jim Mathers in 1949 recalled that at the SCG practice in 1926 Bradman’s ‘stroke equipment was as graceful as the turn-out of Dad and Dave in stiff shirt and tails at Mabel’s wedding party’. Certainly Sir Donald, with his stockbroker’s office in downtown Adelaide, matured to have little in common with those famous Australian comic country characters. Coaches could, and some did, make the case that they could help with polishing. George Dennett the retiring Gloucestershire bowler in 1925 wrote that ‘most people are agreed that coaching is essential to the building up of first-class cricketers. Practically all cricketers taking part in county cricket have undergone expert coaching during some part of their career’. As for Jack (‘I have never had an hour’s coaching in my life’) Hobbs, Dennett suggested that if Hobbs had, he would have ‘arrived’ sooner, and would have been even harder to get out. While teaching of the game must be about as old as the game itself, The Cricketer spring annual of 1926 dated coaching, with exceptions, to the previous 40 or 50 years. That made coaching like psychology and journalism – new and without a full or agreed curriculum, or a way of teaching it. As Aubrey Faulkner wrote in the previous Cricketer : ‘… I am the first to admit that those of us who presume to coach are nothing like well enough equipped for our jobs.’ Arising from that and other articles, Bradman or machine?