Great Cricket Classics : When Bradman went the other way.

Bradman the captain.

Cricket, like all sports, has its legends and stories. There are many who have left their imprint on the game and its spectator’s minds.

Among all the greats who have graced the game, one who is perched on a pedestal of eternal fame is Sir Donald Bradman. In the twenty years that he played cricket, he dominated the game like none. He scored runs at will and with seemingly ridiculous ease. His statistics are part of folklore. A batting average record of 99.94 runs per inning is probably one that can never be matched.

Bradman captained Australia for 24 tests, winning 15 of them. While it was his batting that often decided most of the tests, in 1937, he did something that was innovative as well as cheeky.

The Bradman touch to captaincy.

Melbourne was the venue for the third test of the Ashes series of 1937.

Australia had lost both at Brisbane and Sydney, with Bradman failing in all four innings, including two ducks.

Having won the toss and elected to bat, the Australian batting lineup cracked again. There had been rain around Melbourne. The wet pitch was bordering on pure evil. The ball was exploding off the pitch.

With Australia at 188/6 on day one, play was abandoned. Bradman had failed again, dismissed for 13 this time.

The pitch was in those days left uncovered, and the tests were still the timeless tests. (Some of the tests those days were played till a result was achieved.)

On day 2, Bradman made his first move; he declared the inning at 200/9. The idea was to have a go at the English batting line while the pitch was misbehaving. The England batsmen couldn’t do much better. Wally Hammond managed 32 runs, but they slid from 68 for 3 to 76 for 9 before deciding to declare their innings. For the first time, both teams had declared their first innings.

England captain Gubby Allen had also decided to use the last hour of the day to have a go at the Australians on the wet pitch. He knew that the next day was a rest day, and there was always a chance of the wicket drying out and making life a bit easier.

Bradman’s twist.

Bradman then did something never done again in cricket. In the dressing room, he called his tailenders and asked them to pad up.

The Englishmen were surprised and amused to see the two spinners and true tailenders, Bill O’Reilly and Chuck Fleetwood-Smith, walking in to open the innings.

Bradman had turned the batting order upside down.

It seemed a ludicrous idea. When Fleetwood-Smith raised his eyebrows at the move and asked for an explanation behind this cheeky move, Bradman is said to have explained rather nonchalantly, “You can’t hit the ball on a good wicket, so you won’t be able to edge it on this.”

Though he probably was right, O’Reilly was dismissed on the first ball he faced,, and Australia ended the day at 3 for 1.

Bradman has a field day in the sun.

The rest day proved to be the game changer as conditions changed and the pitch mellowed down. It was fast drying out, and batting looked much simpler. When Fleetwood-Smith was dismissed, the normal number four, Keith Rigg, walked in. The openers Bill Brown and Jack Fingleton followed at five and six. Bradman followed at number seven.

The pitch seemed to have gotten tired of the tricks and decided to go to sleep in the warm sunlight. It was Day 3, and batting was much easier as the balls were playing true.

When Bradman walked in to join Fingleton at 97/5, the batting conditions were almost perfect. They went on to add 346 for the 6th wicket before Fingleton fell for 136. Bradman batted for two days to score 270, taking Australia to 564. The Bradman 270 is still the highest scored by a no 7 batsman.

The crazy idea of reversing order seemed to have worked. England now had an almost impossible target of 689. They made it to 323, but had lost by 365 runs.

Australia had pulled one back in the Ashes. In a stirring comeback, they won the next two test matches too. Bradman had regained his monstrous run-scoring appetite, and the Englishmen were at the receiving end again. He scored 212 at Adelaide and 169 at MCG to lead Australia to a stunning 3-2 Ashes win.

The only time a team had gone 2 down in a 5-test series and still managed to turn it around to 3-2.

The one and only Don had probably, with his cheeky move, inspired a comeback. It looked like a foolish thing to do, but then it worked and how.