Young Bradman

155 ever heard of Bradman; ‘cricket the game and the art was becoming more and more submerged by cricket the contest and the business, its beauty and enterprise increasingly subordinated to sheer efficiency’. So wrote The Cricketer before the English summer of 1927. Bradman did acknowledge that quantity was not everything. In The MCC Book for the Young Cricketer , in 1951, Bradman wrote of how some were still saying that Trumper ‘was a more wonderful player than any man alive or dead’. If Bradman was sticking up for himself, he was also generous about cricket after his (and indeed Trumper’s) time. The figures did not support the case for Trumper; ‘but neither do figures reveal such wonderful things as character, temperament, sportsmanship, style and courage’, all qualities. Frank Woolley called Trumper a beautiful player, ‘with no film to show how graceful he was’. In the 21 st century we have, if anything, too much on film, and still no agreed terms to say if one batsman is more beautiful than another, let alone how much beauty or any other quality, in anything, matters compared with quantities. If Bradman above all batsmen made quantity matter in cricket, Robertson-Glasgow pointed out where the blame, if any, lay: He had the ambition to be ranked as the greatest batsmen in the world; the world, at best a rather stupid and unthinking old thing, like most business men, measured batsmen by the runs they made. The world, said Bradman, must be satisfied ... There was a Trumper or a Macartney in that boy, the freedom that hits a century and is gone. But the tyranny of runs thrust it out, and the Bradman of the record-books is both greater and less than Trumper. In his interview with Ray Martin, Bradman played the piano, stopped and sighed. ‘No good Ray, the fingers aren’t any good, they won’t go where I want them to go.’ Martin asked why. ‘Well, I don’t know, I suppose it’s old age isn’t it, mate?’ ‘Does that frustrate you?’ Martin asked. ‘Yes it does, because I love sitting down and playing at the piano, just for myself, for my own enjoyment, that’s all. And I can’t do it any more.’ Martin asked about golf – ‘very difficult indeed’, Bradman admitted; he could no longer walk 18 holes. Martin had been a good enough interviewer to bring out how Bradman could no more defy old age than anyone else; a kind enough man to then change the subject. Martin was also a skilled enough interviewer to return, at the end, to the most important question; why the difference between the modern greats such as Allan Border and Bradman (‘you put, say Greg Chappell’s and Ian Chappell’s average together, and they don’t even come close to yours as one man’). ‘Well it’s no good asking me the question – I don’t know the answer. I really don’t.’ That sounded plain enough, but Martin was not leaving it at that. ‘OK, but you’ve thought about it?’ These Our Actors