Young Bradman

130 …’; and the ball pitched where Bradman had thought. As with physical moves, it was one thing to have the mental skills, another to have the ‘temperament’ to use them in good time. If science could not yet define ‘temperament’, from the 1900s, at least, cricketers knew that it mattered. Lack of ‘temperament’ would ‘entirely cancel’ any physical or technical skill with the bat, the Surrey amateur batsman Donald Knight wrote in his The More Compleat Cricketer in 1925. In his 1920s writings, Aubrey Faulkner stressed ‘temperament’, that he also more plainly called ‘guts’ and ‘grit’. You could be shy and confident in yourself, but ought not to be meek (or ‘effeminate’, which he did not define either). He and other cricket thinkers were feeling their way towards understanding what went on invisibly inside each man’s head; how each man helped make a team ‘spirit’, also intangible; how all these intangibles were plastic – that is, it was in men’s powers to improve themselves, and thus their fellow players, even the downhearted; and how in ‘big’ matches where everyone was gifted, these intangibles might make all the difference. Go into the Australian dressing room during a Test match, Faulkner wrote rhetorically in 1926, ‘and I will guarantee you will never hear a word which might lead you to suppose that their opponents’ bowling was anything but the veriest ‘muck’.’ If the Australians of 1926 and earlier sound like loud-mouths or boors, Warren Bardsley, for one, ‘always looked after himself’, the Sydney Referee reported in 1922. Bardsley did not smoke or drink, and did not eat meat; which made him a crank. Even if Bardsley were an odd man out, by Bradman’s debut Australian newspapers were remarking how ‘a quieter lot of men in any team one has never seen’. The 1930 tourists on the boat to England were, so it was said, much the same; Archie Jackson was ‘retiring’, the bridge-playing Oldfield even more so; Grimmett was in his cabin most of the day. Bradman meanwhile was ‘restlessly energetic’, exercising on deck, dancing, or playing the piano in the lounge. Someone as self-possessed as Bradman, sociable enough, and without weaknesses that might be a drain on others, evidently could fit into such a team, at least at first. In his early memoir, Bradman claimed it ‘quite impossible to explain’ why he was ‘almost a total stranger’ to nervousness. By his 1988 interview, whether more self- aware or more able to shed modesty, he could explain: ‘I think that was largely a question of confidence, I had confidence in my own ability.’ Learie Constantine, in his 1933 book Cricket and I , having bowled at Bradman for West Indies in Australia in 1930/31, for little gain – in nine innings he bowled Bradman once for ten, and had him caught for 223 – wrote that ‘to me the distinguishing mark of Bradman’s play is his confidence’. The historian Manning Clark called Bradman ‘confidence incarnate.’ Significantly, Bradman admitted to getting ‘a little bit nervous’ at the end of his career: ‘As you get older you learn all the ways that you can get out, you know all the things that go wrong and you have a little less confidence in your own ability.’ A new test for Bradman – reporting for the Daily Mail in 1953 – brought a new perspective. On arriving for the first day of the First Test at Nottingham on Thursday 11 June, someone told Bradman he would find writing about the game harder than playing: ‘Having some How did he do it?