Young Bradman

123 In 1947, Jack Fingleton recalled bodyline in his book Cricket Crisis ; serialised, because still newsworthy, in the Australian press. As Australia’s opener, he was standing at the other end when Bradman came to the middle at Melbourne on 30 December 1932, in the Second Test against England, his first Test innings against bodyline. Bill Bowes began his ‘lumbering run’, ‘and to my surprise I saw Bradman leave his guard and move across the wicket’. It was one of the most famous balls of the bodyline tour, and thus of 20 th century cricket; Bradman had expected a bouncer and was standing outside his off stump, when Bowes deceived him with a ball that Bradman could only edge onto his leg stump. Bradman had forgotten his own advice, that he learned in his third first-class match, on 2 January 1928; never to decide what to do to a ball, until he saw it. Bowes had not bowled bodyline; Bradman had let himself be fooled. It was as Dr Eric Barbour wrote in 1932: ’90 per cent of batsmen in first class cricket get out through mistakes of their own, and not through unplayable bowling …. once a batsman has reached a certain standard in manipulation of the bat, psychology is 90 per cent of successful run-getting’. Bodyline worked; as Fingleton put it, ‘Bradman showed how this type of bowling really upset him’; precisely because the English bowlers did not have to do it, for Bradman to change his ways. By the Fifth Test, Bradman was ‘on the move’ when Larwood was about to bowl. Bodyline was like a manoeuvre by Napoleon or another genius on the battlefield who, faced by an army on a hill, ousted the enemy from their dug defences onto unprepared ground, the better to destroy them. Fingleton recalled unnamed people ‘murmuring against Bradman’, in that never-defined place, ‘the cricket circle’. Critics deplored Bradman for trying to score off every ball. In Australia’s second innings, their last against bodyline, Bradman made the top score of 71. An ‘Alice in Wonderland’ innings, Fingleton called it; ‘barely a stroke he made was known in the text book’. It sounded as if Bradman, doing his best to make runs before the tactic of bodyline got him out, was batting in a hurry, in a Saturday afternoon first grade, or limited-overs 21 st century style, or the style of a time not yet known to us. Or, a time that will never come; because according to Fingleton, Bradman’s batting always had a ‘streak of the unorthodox’. Whether you were for or against Bradman (or Jardine) may have depended on whether either man felt able to trust you; to explain the ‘why’ behind their methods, as to an equal. ‘Until there is an exchange of confidences, friendship is impossible,’ Bowes wrote in his memoir, recalling how he got on with his captain Jardine after a frank talk off the field, after disagreeing on it. Bowes also argued that bodyline was a ‘natural evolution’, something seldom appreciated, or even mentioned, for all the words afterwards. That England won the series hid what Frank Woolley wrote in his 1936 memoir; that in the opinion of many, Bradman won the duel with Larwood. Woolley meant not that Bradman’s career went on regardless, while Larwood’s, for political reasons, did not; in purely batting terms, Bradman did adapt to bodyline, though he did less well than before or after. In each bodyline Test, for example, Bradman made more runs than Jardine. Just as banks How did he do it?