Young Bradman

128 How did he do it? dead five weeks later – Ranji’s judgement of pace, length and direction, and positioning of the body, meant more than the ‘minutiae of technique’ as taught to boys. To put it even more simply, Ranji found out where the ball was, went there, and hit it, even walking in front of his stumps and turning an over-pitched ball to the boundary at fine leg. Ranji, like Bradman, foreshadowed the likes of Kevin Pietersen and the more mobile and adventurous, or less patient, 21 st century batsmen. Coaches, whether the MCC’s or freelances like Faulkner, no more embraced Ranji in the 1900s than they did Bradman in 1930. Even if you could coach either of their styles, or any, a player had to apply it. In Cardus’ pen-portrait of Bradman in his 1945 book English Cricket , ask yourself how much was coachable: He has combined defensive play off the back foot with attack that seldom loses sight of the ball; rarely do you see him compelled to lunge forward speculatively; the secret of his mystery is that by swift judgement and soft feet he can always make the length he needs for the execution of his wide range of strokes . By admitting to Bradman’s ‘mystery’, Cardus was doubting that anyone could know how Bradman did it, let alone teach it. Jardine, a man who made his own destiny more than most, in his own book Cricket argued that coaching was not an end in itself; what you did with it was all: “‘The fault,’ as Shakespeare so truly tells us, ‘is not in our stars, but in ourselves’.” If this was true for holding a piece of wood, it was even truer as modern man had to handle ever more things: a vacuum cleaner, motorcycle, or machine-gun. ‘A bullet, I believe, is usually easier to aim at a small target than a football is at a large one,’ wrote Tom Wintringham, the Home Guard trainer, in his 1943 book The Story of Weapons and Tactics: Few soldiers, I think, find great difficulty in weapon training, in learning to use the weapons of today. Even a tank, though tiring, is not very hard to drive. What is hard is to learn where and when to drive tanks, where, when and in what direction to fire weapons. Wintringham’s point – ‘it is impossible to learn the right use of weapons without at the same time learning tactics’ - also implied a profound political question. If men in a mass army could grasp tactics, what else could they do for themselves? The grip and stance, so important to Shillinglaw, no more defined Bradman than taking shorthand defined a journalist. By leaving out the ‘where, when and in what direction’, Shillinglaw was assuming that the batsman was like a secretary who learns shorthand, who merely makes a note of the letter that the manager wants typed. Bradman or any batsman were more than that; they were like the journalist who has to ask questions, be wise to any clues, and turn his shorthand into copy, in time for deadline. If Shillinglaw were right, if everyone held a bat, looped it, and stood the same as Bradman, would they all average 99.94?! ‘No two batsmen play alike, and it is no use one trying to copy another,’ Hendren wrote on retirement, in the 1938 Wisden . ‘It cannot be done.’ Bradman said the same in a different way – ‘there is a wide margin within the limits of accepted technique, wherein players may be successful’ – in the 1960s.