Young Bradman

145 The Himalayan Men tempo of the game more intense. Paradoxically, player productivity, the rate they get through overs, has slowed drastically. In 23 hours of the Lord’s Test in 1930, the two teams bowled 504 overs, an average of just under 22 overs an hour. The international T20 innings since 2014 takes 85 minutes (previously 80, so the direction is ever slower). That gives a rate of just over 14 overs an hour. The usual reason, if anybody bothers to offer one – less slow bowling – does not wash; slow bowlers are taking theit time too. If anything, professional players are barely reaching that minimum of 14. The cause is more subtle, less admitted. As elite players have faced changes for the worse in their conditions of work - fielders, any age or rank, having to throw their bodies to the ground to save perhaps a single run – they have resisted, as any body of workers would. They could hardly do anything about the shorter formats, so they have controlled what they can. As early as England’s 1950/51 tour of Australia – that is, the first one after Bradman’s retirement – Jack Fingleton was complaining of unneeded breaks for drinks and ‘a general principle’ of modern life: ‘knock off on the job whenever the chance offers’. One of the few men with the perspective to see these changes began his cricket-working life as Bradman ended his: Tom Graveney. He began his 1970 book Cricket over Forty with a protest like any factory worker ordered to run around more if he wanted to keep his job; ‘a form of liberty taking’, he called it. The ‘Sunday League’ from the summer of 1969 was ‘cruelty’ in the field. Not so much when batting, ‘because if you are playing that well you do not have to think about it. Everything drops into place and it is no effort.’ In a three-day county game, once Graveney made 60 or 70, he would rest, by agreement with the other batsman, for ten minutes (‘I literally used to take time off’). A Sunday League 40-over match did not allow that. Physically and mentally, the game had become ‘fierce’, even outside the one-dayers; the ‘pressures’ meant that a side could no longer afford poor fielders, or days when matches drifted. Nor would spectators (if there were any) tolerate it. Young players no longer had time to settle. Graveney recalled how he began as ‘the apprentice’ – a significant choice of word, likening cricket to any other workplace – and experienced men, from Bradman’s time, such as Charlie Barnett, helped. Graveney saw how the cricketing workplace had become harder for newcomers: ‘They have to grow up too quickly, the young players of today.’ The same is true today, only more so; so much so, that it is taken for granted, and the only men who know of a different sort of life are dead. The Himalayas have become higher. Life in general has speeded up. You argue over a Bradman record with someone in the pub? Once, you could only settle it by catching a bus to the library to see their copy of Wisden , or writing to your local newspaper or walking to the nearest call box to ring your friend, if you had a ten pence coin (and if he lived in Australia, you would have to post a letter; sea mail could take months). Now, you can email or search the internet and have a more or less instant reply. Cricket, or any pastime, cannot ignore this speeding-up. If a shop or sport does not satisfy customers, people will go elsewhere. If like Graveney a batsman runs out of puff – ‘the little white