Young Bradman

76 Australia ‘I rather fancied opening, it was just one of those things that appealed to me, I thought it would be rather fun, to open the innings,’ he recalled in old age. Richardson had failed as an opener with Woodfull in the previous two Tests; Bradman had an eye on opening for Australia. In the first innings Bradman ‘attempted to glance a high rising ball from [Tim] Wall, and placed it into the safe hands of Grimmett’, close at square leg; out for five. Was that another example of Bradman’s weakness against bodyline, before anyone put a name to it? In the second innings a low ball from Wall beat him and bowled him for two. ‘I just couldn’t cope with him,’ Bradman admitted nearly 60 years later: ‘… that was enough for that experiment, they [Australia] put me down the list.’ Jackson, who made 162 at Adelaide, opened with Woodfull in the Fourth Test instead and made his famed 164. The camera was at the gate for a practical reason; only there could it capture the batsmen at close enough range, and fairly still. The men had already put on their formal public faces. Yet on that threshold between the pavilion and the field of play – while, in a sense, they walked to work - you could gain a sense of the men that you could not from the usual image of ‘action’ at the wicket. Bradman looked slim; Jackson, thin. Each wore their shirt collar turned up to keep the sun off their necks, as many Australian cricketers did. Each wore a pair of cotton batting gloves with the hedgehog-like rubber along each finger (‘during my early life I did not know what a batting glove was and even now would rather bat without them providing I knew I was not going to be hit’, Bradman admitted in his 1930s autobiography). Bradman wore his long sleeves rolled to the elbow (again, typical) showing well-browned forearms; Jackson wore his turned only to the wrist. Each man carried his bat in his right hand. Jackson’s was trailing and in shadow; Bradman’s, in the sunlight, had tape around it, about one third down. In his 1958 book The Art of Cricket , Bradman wrote: A legend has been built up around certain players, particularly Victor Trumper, who, so it is said, would take out any old bat and play equally well with it. If that is true I admire his skill all the more, because frankly I could not do so. This was characteristic mature Bradman; diplomatic, while putting his points across, in this case querying the Trumper legend while paying the conventional tribute. Bradman, and Trumper, belonged to a now- lost culture that was less materialistic and took more care of what few material goods it did own. People commonly made cricket kit last, just as if they had a hole in a shoe, they took it to the cobbler or repaired it themselves with cardboard. Once things were beyond mending, people made them last longer by passing them to someone smaller and younger; hence Bradman’s first proper bat. It did not mean Bradman was mean, or poor; or that Trumper was slapdash, by the standards of the time. During a long stand in England’s first innings in the First Test, Larwood swapped bats with Hendren – for a while; then Tate brought out a couple from the pavilion, and Larwood chose one ‘with a nice fat bandage around the blade’. A cricketer in Bradman’s time could apply himself seriously to the game with an indifference to equipment that would shock 21 st century players.