Young Bradman

58 New South Wales Kelleway had raised the dilemma for selectors for all time. A sure way to make your case for rising in rank is to make runs. Jackson had on his state debut in Queensland, 12 months before, and had stayed in the team since. Yet just as the best salesman in your company may not turn out a good manager of salesmen, you cannot be sure that the highest-scorer in one grade of cricket will make runs in a grade higher. How good a player looks does matter, as that can suggest the man knows how to do well, against better bowlers. Yet unless he shows, often enough, that he can do well, how can he earn selection? The selectors could reasonably ask in late 1927 which was the real Bradman: the century-maker, or the man out for single figures? Bradman, and Scanes, only made the New South Wales 12 because Jack Gregory and Hampden Love could not travel. Scanes had played a few times for the state over several seasons and newspapers duly listed him ahead of Bradman. ‘I realised,’ Bradman wrote in his autobiography, ‘that it might be only a short step from inter-state cricket to a place in the Australian side against England and as I was already dreaming of one day getting to England I was now more than ever determined to make it.’ Again, for a man who was at best on the edge of selection for his state, he was aiming high. On the way to Adelaide the team broke the journey at Broken Hill and played on Wednesday 14 December on a new, unturfed oval, and a concrete pitch and bowlers’ run-ups. Most of the visitors played in sandshoes, ‘but not having a pair with me I played in ordinary walking shoes’. For a man who prided himself on attention to detail, Bradman was evidently learning as he went along. Batting at four, he was stumped for 46 as the state reached 215 for five in reply to 206. He kept the match ball as a souvenir. This attitude – of savouring everything about the life of a high-grade Caricature of all-rounder Jack Gregory.