Young Bradman

47 First grade Alan Kippax. 1922 caricature of Arthur Mailey. Warren Bardsley. such as Neil Harvey into the 1948 ‘Invincibles’. Or can they? Batsmen who never or seldom played for Australia in the 1990s and 2000s would have been welcome once that great team broke up around 2010. In England as in Australia, only the unforeseeable Packer rival matches of 1977-79 disrupted the smooth flow of elite talent - the promoting of the young and discarding of the old and not good enough - as much as the world wars. In 1921, JW Hearne lamented ‘we are short of practically a whole generation of players’. Enough pre-war players had flourished for New South Wales and Australia for their selectors to shrug off the war. As in any team sport,