Young Bradman

132 How did he do it? Bradman said much the same to Ray Martin (‘sometimes I did play reckless shots, and sometimes I paid the price’). Humphrey Gilbert agreed, years before his four overs at the Australians at Worcester in 1930 went for 30 runs. A batsman who played for the draw was easy to bowl at: ‘It is the batsman who has shots all round the wicket whom the bowler dislikes.’ Authorities on the game understood the Bradman they saw. Previewing the Australians in May 1930, Jack Hobbs said Bradman believed in attack as the best defence, ‘and from the start of his innings he goes for the bowling with surprising vigour’. After Bradman’s ‘triumphal day’ at Lord’s, on Saturday 28 June 1930, when he made 155 of his eventual 254 (at an overall rate of 40 an hour), Charlie Macartney wrote how ‘this young champion has proved he can adapt himself to both games – stubborn defence such as in the First Test [when Australia lost by 93 runs despite Bradman’s 131] and brilliant aggression’. Even before Bradman left for England, some were asking in print ‘the secret of Bradman’s phenomenal success’. We can dismiss what he said to three young women who were waiting for him as he walked into his hotel after his 185 at Leicester on Monday 5 May 1930. When someone said, ‘well played’, Bradman replied: ‘I am lucky.’ Bradman knew it took more than luck; it was only a phrase to fob off strangers. Journalists naturally sought an answer, that would give them the scoop of the year. To them Bradman had to tell the truth. During the rainy Headingley Test in July 1930, upstairs at the Queens Hotel in Leeds, Bradman had a ‘test of wrist strength’ – an arm wrestle? – with Geoffrey Tebbutt, and Clyde Foster of the London Evening Standard . Tebbutt won, Bradman came third. What was the secret? they asked. ‘There is none,’ he replied. ‘It is a constant battle. I have to hit him [the bowler] or he has to beat me.’ As Bradman reminded Ray Martin, about his famous no-score in his last Test innings, ‘it’s one ball at a time in cricket’. This obvious truth is often taken for granted. One of the few others to point it out is one of the wisest writers on the game, Mike Brearley, in the 30 th anniversary edition of his Art of Captaincy : ‘All cricket is made up of discrete events …’ Bradman said more in the Daily Mail in 1953, after the Second Test when England famously batted the last day to draw: ‘It needs but one ball to scatter the stumps. In that way cricket differs enormously from other sports where a dozen errors can be made and recovered.’ By 1938, Bradman’s third summer in England, critics had given up wondering how he did it. Like the Midlands journalist Leslie Duckworth, they asked ‘what is to be done about Bradman?’. Answering his own question, Duckworth said England should find the best leg-break bowler, as that sort of bowling was the most dangerous; turning away from the right-handed batsman’s legs. Even in 1930, Bradman found it hard to face leg-spinner Ian Peebles in the Fourth Test, partly because the light was poor. As a young man, Bradman could, in good light, ‘see the ball actually turning in the air’, and judge which way the ball was spinning: ‘I couldn’t see the ball when I got older.’ Leg spinners, however, as Duckworth went on, ‘are apt to be so erratic that before they produce the unstoppable