Young Bradman

64 New South Wales Wales at the SCG, Bradman was due to bat at eight. He had to wait as next man while Kippax and Gordon Morgan added 253. When Bradman went in at 467 for six, he faced another problem of the proper batsman lowest in the order; the men above him had done all the work. ‘Alan had been batting for some time, and had made quite a good score,’ Bradman said in old age - Kippax was probably in the 180s: and I went in to join him. The fellah bowled him a ball short of a length on the stumps and Alan quietly pushed it to mid-on for a single and it looked so easy that the first ball I got I tried to do the same thing. But of course I didn’t realise that I hadn’t been there and hadn’t got used to the pace of the pitch and I was too late and the ball got through. I was bowled, or lbw, one or the other. Not knowing Bradman’s thoughts, the newspapers merely reported that a straight ball, which Bradman expected to turn, bowled him. One of his future biographers, Philip Lindsay, was watching Bradman for the first time. ‘The lad of whom we had heard and from whom we had hoped so much out for a duck! And against a bowler of no great reputation!’ Francis Gough only took ten wickets in 40 matches for Queensland. As Bradman told the story in his 1930 serial, any batsman could sympathise: ‘It seemed a long way back to the pavilion.’ Not everyone however has applied the lesson; don’t make your mind up what to do with a ball beforehand. ‘I consider getting a ‘duck’ that day has saved me getting many since,’ Bradman wrote in 1930. Men who have tried to explain Bradman’s extraordinariness with a characteristic, physical (his ‘eye’, or balance) or mental (concentration), have usually missed how Bradman was a supreme learner – something that we take for granted, living when we have to learn so much. Philip Lindsay, no player of the game, had the novelist’s feel for Victoria and Australia batsman Bill Woodfull.