Young Bradman

150 sensitive youth or one wanting to make a name in the world may choose music or film-making because the pleasure can be easy to come by – just pick up a guitar, bang the drums and sing along, and remember to press ‘record’; whereas it takes all day to drive to and from a match, and play, when the coach’s favourites do all the batting and bowling anyway. When Bob Woolmer saw his own son was not one of those favourites, at school in South Africa, Woolmer had a word – so much for trusting the all-knowing coach! Each hurdle of selection – to an academy, the next tour – is a sieve, and it takes more than talent to stay in the reckoning. You need someone to ferry you, to keep feeding you; you need enough money behind you. In a boys’ annual, the privately-schooled Peter May wrote in 1958: Jim Laker, Tony Lock, the Bedser twins, the great Don Bradman, of Australia, and so many of the other great players who have been head-line stars for so long did not have my early opportunities. Yet they hit the top level just as surely. They made it because besides their hard work (as May pointed out) a relative handful of amateur administrators looked out for them. Now that cricket and other sports have done away with those volunteers, or cynically exploit them, who is left to bring on the Bradmans. The next Bradman may be already among us, the son of a Sudanese taxi driver in Sydney; or an addict, dead of an overdose of drugs in some squalid flat. They live without ever touching a cricket bat; without opportunity. The Himalayan Men