Young Bradman

129 As for footwork, Bradman recalled in old age being stationary as the bowler ran up: But what I certainly did do was to start to move [speaking more deliberately] just as he was letting the ball go; in other words I didn’t wait until I saw the ball in the air, I made a preliminary movement; this is clearly visible in film, I have a lot of film which shows this, especially against the faster bowler. I always move my back foot back and slightly across to the off as the bowler was about to deliver the ball … His bat’s blade was about level with the top of the stumps as the ball was bowled: ‘I think this gave the illusion that I saw the ball quicker than other people, I didn’t, my eyesight was no better than other people.’ If his body did not look remarkable – ‘the little man’, Keith Miller called him, out of mischief, or malice - Bradman looked after it. He was, he wrote in his December 1930 life serial, ‘a strict teetotaller’. Another man who looked after himself, the England wicket-keeper Alan Knott, met Bradman for the first time on the 1970/71 tour of Australia: ‘My first impression was one of surprise that such a giant among batsmen should be so small in stature.’ In the dressing room, after his 452, Bradman had a cup of tea and ‘then felt perfectly fit to take my place in the field’. The physical, visible actions, and the mental, and invisible, affected each other, a truth that Bradman revealed during his journalism in 1953: ‘Players become jaded. Their powers to concentrate diminish and errors of various kinds surreptitiously creep in. For these reasons alone one may more readily execute the mistakes which must remain the prerogative of humans.’ What of concentration, defined by Hutton as Bradman’s ‘ability to shut everything from his mind but the task in hand’? According to Cardus, Bradman once told him ‘that’s the secret’. The Essex player Jack O’Connor wrote from experience in his 1948 ‘young cricketers’ manual’ of Bradman’s ‘amazing powers of concentration’: ‘He is always watching every ball right on to his bat …’ How did he keep concentrating? Not by talking to himself, Bradman said in his 1988 radio interview: I think concentration is something you either have or you don’t have. I don’t think anybody can give it to you. It’s just a natural thing … I was lucky, I think that in those days I had no difficulty in concentrating for long periods, but I know lots of other players who go and make 20 or 30 runs and seem to lose their concentration and get out; I can’t tell you why. Some witnesses hailed him more generally. Dr Eric Barbour in 1932 said Bradman had ‘the most remarkable cricketer’s brain that I have ever known’; RB Vincent of the Times in 1949 recalled Bradman’s ‘uncanny talent of seemingly knowing just what every bowler intended to do’. Bradman at least once seemed able to predict the very near future; when on 434 against Queensland, and Hugh Thurlow was preparing to bowl: ‘I seemed to sense that the ball would be a short-pitched one on the leg stump, and I could almost feel myself getting ready to make my shot How did he do it?