Young Bradman

146 The Himalayan Men lights start to flash in front of your eyes and you feel as if somebody is constantly kicking you behind the knees’ – someone with puff will take his place. Bradman’s average is safe, because if he were around today he would have to play at this new tempo, sometimes faster than the one that suited him. He would have to take more risks like anyone else, lofting the ball and throwing himself at the crease to avoid a run-out; he would get out sooner, and more often. Except that we must assume nothing. Bill Frindall, in conversation in 1988, raised the what-if Bradman had played as many Tests as the then record-breaking Test batsman Sunil Gavaskar. ‘What makes you think I would only have maintained my average?’ Bradman replied. ‘If I had had the opportunity of playing in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, I think I might have increased it.’ The 80-year-old still had that unbounded confidence of the teenager who expected to play for New South Wales before he played a match in first grade. It was as RC Robertson-Glasgow had written, in arguably the best short piece of writing about Bradman, in the 1949 Wisden . There was still something of the boy in the man: ‘He never lost a certain primitive and elemental ‘cheekiness’, and mingled, as it were, with his exact and scientific calculations, there was the immortal impudence of the gamin .’ What should still nag at us about Bradman is not one record or another, but that his averages, whether for Tests, his states, or career, were so far ahead, 20 or 30 or more, of anyone else’s. Has anyone in the new formats done the same? A 21 st century Bradman might not get as far as an elite team in the first place. Ed Smith, with a privileged background – after showing his batting technique to Bradman, he went to fee-paying schools and Cambridge University - was guilty of assuming, when he wrote of a ‘huge’ talent pool. That was not the same as saying the pool was well, or at all, fished. Some say the talent pool is ever smaller, because the young have so much more they can do. Steve Waugh in 2013 wondered if young people had the desire to persevere with any sport: ‘the time it takes to improve and ultimately be very proficient at a particular sporting skill has become a roadblock’. While true enough, like so many things it was not new. The ‘youngster of today has better opportunities and facilities than any other generation was granted’, wrote Steve Bloomer, in 1921. If Bradman were born in Bowral in 2008, in a family like his own, what would become of him? (Naturally, this what-if makes no sense; how would he feel, growing up across the road from the Bradman Museum?!) Computers might capture him; they have captured enough adults. It’s hard to compete with games that let you pretend you are the best sportsmen on the planet; or that take you to another planet. Even if Bradman stayed true to cricket, actual physical cricket, it demands like other sports that elite youths specialise years before Bradman did (let alone footballer-cricketers such as Compton). The conveyor belt of coaching, academies and tours abroad has become the quickest way to succeed; among youths your own age. Would that suit Bradman; would he be one of the few to progress; and if he did, would he be as good as he was, even better, or what? Bob