Chance to savour the Don (16 December 1998)

16 December 1998

Chance to savour the Don

E W Swanton

E W Swanton enjoys a timely comprehensive offering on the great Australian batsman

THE personalities of Sir Donald Bradman and W G Grace and everything about them have a seemingly inexhaustible appeal to followers of cricket, as their recent anniversaries have made clear, 90th in one case, 150th in the other. And there is yet another Bradman publication to swell the canon in time for the Christmas market, dignified further by association with Wisden.

In short, there is now on the market the first edition of an annual Australian Wisden Almanac and, as a trailer for their new title, the publishers, Hardie Grant, of Victoria, put out in August Wisden on Bradman, 90th Birthday Edition.

Graeme Wright, the New Zealander who edited the Almanac from 1986-92, has assembled in this new work the major Wisden writings about, and in two cases by, Don Bradman plus the scores and description of every match he played in throughout his career from 1927-49.

The Don's own contributions are, as one would expect, clear and logical. In Cricket at the Crossroads in the 1939 edition he writes: "I am all in favour of 'hastening slowly' and have admired the peaceful but purposeful way in which cricket has for so long been administered in England. Nevertheless, I cannot help feeling that with the quickening of modern tempo . . . it behoves all of us to realise we are the custodians of the welfare of cricket and must guard its future even more zealously than its present."

He therefore pleads for an acceleration by changing the law to eight balls an over (as it then was and still is in Australia). Eight balls were tried in England in 1939 but not pursued after the war because, it was alleged, bowlers lingered that little bit longer and the number of balls bowled per hour showed no increase.

In his 1986 Wisden article Whither Cricket Now?, also, alas, in vain, on the same hurry-up theme, he advocated "some limitation in the length of a bowler's run-up", a reform which had been advocated by Frank Worrell to the International Cricket Conference of 1963. Would that it might one day come about!

In 1939 his most critical comment was against the use of "dope" (i.e., liquid cow dung) in the preparation of Test wickets, condemning especially the Oval in 1934 when Australia made 701 and 1938 when England scored 903 for seven.

In Cricket at the Crossroads he thought the bowler needed more help and proposed that the lbw law should be extended to include the ball pitching outside off-stump irrespective of the position of the leg. This came into force 40 years later and then only if the batsman had offered no stroke.

Bradman's later effusion is broadly sympathetic to limited-overs cricket. He applauds the pace of the action and the one-day regulation which directs that any ball which passes or would have passed over the batsman's shoulder is a no-ball. Strong against intimidation, the great man would extend the law thus to all cricket. Hear, hear to that.

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)