Young Bradman

71 New South Wales Sydney office. He had made his name the season before in both halves of cricket that matter: what you can quantify – his 402 runs in first grade at an average of 57 compared well with Fairfax’s 413 at 51 – and the qualities that you cannot quantify, such as his defying the best bowlers when his team most needed it. Having shown his quality in the 1927/28 season, first grade now only mattered for Bradman to prove he was in good enough form for New South Wales to pick him. After only three months clear of cricket, Bradman was wearing his whites again as early as Saturday 1 September 1928, at the southern Sydney suburb of Bexley, for charity. Bradman was leg before for three; Archie Jackson retired on 60. Bradman made nought at Lismore, against a Richmond-Tweed team that included Lou Benaud (soon the father of Richie). Bradman was one of 23 asked to practice at the SCG. On 29 September, the first round of first grade, Bradman made 106 not out at Chatswood Oval against Gordon. It was probably then, as Bradman recalled in old age, that to a half volley outside the off stump he ‘deliberately got under the ball and lifted it over point for six’: … and the captain came along to me at the end of the over and he said, that’s a fluke, you got one off the top end. I said, no, I didn’t, I got it off the middle of the bat … and he said, I don’t believe you. I said, well, you ask him to bowl one in the next over in the same place and we will see. Sure enough he did and I repeated the shot. He gave up, he agreed with me then … That day, Bradman was ‘never in trouble’, as reporters would keep saying. A critic in Truth the next day did find fault: ‘Against the fast stuff, however, he will have to play a straighter bat, and get out of the habit of pulling away. On any but a slow wicket this is fatal.’ Norman Fox bowled him at once the next Saturday for 107. Once more Bradman showed his habit – not always, because he was not a machine – of starting with a big score, as he did at Worcester on tours of England, and in the first post-war Test. Before any more first grade, Australia’s selectors named Bradman in the ‘Rest of Australia’ team, the ‘Possibles’ in other words, in a four-day trial match in Melbourne against ‘Australia’. The ‘Rest’ lost by an innings. In the first innings Bradman snicked to Oldfield off Grimmett for 14, and was bowled first ball after tea on the third and final day by Ron Oxenham. On a slow, easy, covered wicket, Bradman, like Jackson and Vic Richardson and most of the ‘Rest’, did not rise to the big occasion. In fairness, that was only Bradman’s sixth first-class match. In his seventh, starting a week later, he hit 131 (out of 248) and 133 not out of 401 for four, as New South Wales beat Queensland by six wickets. That made Bradman the tenth Australian to make two centuries in a Sheffield Shield match. Jackson had done it the season before, and Kippax the season before that; such famous batsmen as Trumper and Clem Hill never did it. By the second innings, Bradman was facing a new challenge; fielders placed in the deep so that ‘most of his best strokes only produced a single’. By placing the ball between fielders, Bradman showed he could master it. When he next played at the SCG, the authorities gave him a gift to mark his