Sir Don Bradman is one of the greatest cricketers to ever play the game. He was known to score a huge amount of runs. He was so proficient that his batting that his batting average grew and grew. In his final Test, he had the opportunity to have his batting average read 100. However, that didn't happen.
"Out from the pavilion came the short, slight, little figure whose name will still be in bright lights as long as cricket is played." This is how a contemporary newspaper report set the scene for Sir Donald Bradman's last innings.
"What a reception the crowd gave him. All the way to the wicket they cheered that human frame to whose near-infallible secrets no one has yet been able to find an adequate answer." It was 17:50 on Saturday, 14 August 1948 at The Oval cricket ground in London; and there were 40 minutes of play left in the day.
"Don came in to bat, facing Eric Hollies, the leg-spin bowler," says legendary Australian all-rounder, Neil Harvey. At 19, he was 20 years younger than his hero. Playing in just his second Test, he sat in the pavilion waiting to bat, watching it unfold.
"The reception he got when he went out to bat at The Oval, from the English team and the public — because the ground was packed, absolutely packed … the English players all got round him when he came in to bat, all took their caps off and gave him his three cheers … and you can't tell me that doesn't affect somebody. And I don't think Don would be immune from that."
The English players were gracious, but not about to go easy on the figure who had menaced them for four tours and two decades.
The English people loved him and he loved them back, says Harvey. "He really wasn't expected to go on the tour but he felt he owed it to the English public. He had health problems, fibrositis and such.
"He didn't want the English people to be let down. And because they'd been suffering so much during the war, he felt compelled to go. That's the reason he went. The English adored him right till the finish. At 39 years of age, he went to England in 1948 and captained this great Invincibles team, and he still made two centuries. That's not too bad for 39, is it?"
The farewell piece in The Times called him a "miracle." "To have seen Bradman at the wicket is to have enjoyed the precision of the art of batting," it said.
"Larwood's fierce attack and the cunning of Verity's spin — and in the last chapters, Bedser's patient industry — tested his almost inhuman quickness and certainty of reaction, but only to remind spectators that he was a miracle of flesh and blood and not a little robot under a long-peaked green cap."
"At the top of his form there was no getting him out. Some baby now toddling after a soft ball in New South Wales may grow up to be the scourge of English Test teams in the sixties. Old stagers who then watch him piling up a century will be able, however finely he plays, to murmur: 'Ah, but you should have seen Bradman.'"
This would be Bradman's final knock. That was almost assured when he strode out in the fifth Test of the Ashes series, with Australia on 117-1 and looking to complete an unbeaten tour. England had been dismissed for 52 in its first innings; meaning the Australians wouldn't have to bat again.
He walked to the wicket in front of a crowd of 20 000, having scored 6 996 Test runs and lost his wicket 69 times. His average was 101.39. If he was to be dismissed for a 70th time, he needed just four more runs to reach 7 000 and end his career with an average of 100. Nobody knew that.
Bradman was bowled second ball by Eric Hollies, a Warwickshire leg-spinner for whom the rowdiest stand at Edgbaston is now named and finished a legendary career with 6 996 runs and the famous average of 99.94.
"In those days, statistics were nothing," Harvey says. "Nobody had a clue. The press didn't know. There was no television, of course. And if the press didn't know, nobody's going to know. So that's how it was. We just played the game as a normal session."
Sir Don Bradman’s final innings duck in the fifth Ashes Test in 1948 at the Oval had little bearing on the match. His team won by an innings and 149 runs, clinching the series 4-0.
It is failure, yet it underpins the Bradman legend. An instance of fallibility that makes his seemingly impossible career believable even now, approaching a century later. He retired with an average of 100, save for the rounding of a decimal point. All up, 6 996 Test runs but still four short.
The footage of the dismissal is almost as familiar as Bradman’s 99.94 career mark. English spinner, Eric Hollies, comes into bowl, a hard cut to Bradman playing and missing, the bails dropping to the ground. Pivoting, the Australian captain quickly wanders off, with a look to the heavens and what appears to be a smile.
The significance of these seconds have grown. An unforgettable quirk in the standard-bearer’s astonishing record of consistency. The match took place one week after Greg Chappell was born. Through his and subsequent generations, Bradman’s record remains comfortably in another class, an ambition which has helped drive Australia’s culture of success. Its double exclamation point, its memento mori, somehow makes it even more remarkable.
Yet, there is a moment in Bradman’s trajectory of far greater import. A moment whose greatness was celebrated more by those who witnessed it first-hand than observers in later decades. When there was something still to be gained and much to be lost.
Before the boy from Bowral was an all-timer, before he was untouchable, he was – briefly – human. In the mid-1930s, his impact had been blunted by Bodyline tactics. Afterwards, he went 13 first-class innings without a century, the longest such spell of his career. He returned to form in the 1934 Ashes, but soon after suffered complications from appendicitis and missed Australia’s tour of South Africa in 1935-36.
I wrote about the Bodyline series which you can check out here.
The Australian team performed well under the captaincy of the Chappell brothers’ grandfather, Vic Richardson, winning the Test series 4-0. Yet Bradman was returned as a selector and – for the first time – captain, for England’s Ashes tour in the 1936-37 summer.
The machinations mired the man in the politics of the time. A contentious decision by Bradman and his fellow selectors to drop veteran bowler, Clarrie Grimmett and hand four players debuts was, therefore, a gamble. When the first two Tests led to successive defeats, reports of "dissension" filled the newspapers. Dissent, against the Don!
A full MCG in the third Test saw Bradman go out for 13 in the first innings. Rain came late on the first day and on the resumption of play, an avalanche of wickets: 15 for barely 130 runs saw two innings end. The Australian captain sent in tailenders at the top of the order to protect his batters and himself.
With a lead of 221 but just five wickets in hand, the match hung in the balance. On to a difficult but improving wicket, Bradman finally appeared. The 88,000-strong crowd – part of a record Test attendance of 350,000 – waited on the captain’s fate. By the end of the day, Bradman and Jack Fingleton had put on 97 runs. A "fine partnership," Sydney’s Daily Telegraph reported. "Australia on top," read one English newspaper.
On he batted. Past the century mark. For more than a day. He went beyond a double ton. Across 458 minutes, Bradman ended with 270 off 375 deliveries with 22 boundaries. His fourth-highest score and, in his country’s hour of need, the last time he would pass 250 in a Test.
Twenty-four hours later, the tide had come all the way in. "We confess we were beginning to wonder whether Bradman … had not lost touch," one journalist wrote. "He has re-established himself as a batsman and, what was more important, he re-established Australian cricket." The Daily Telegraph said he was, "the master batsman," “the creator of a new technique" in "world-staggering form." In 2001, Wisden named the innings cricket’s best ever.
Bradman’s runs set Australia up for victory in Melbourne. His side rallied in the series, winning the final two tests to defend the Ashes. Even today, no team in world cricket – not even Bazball-era England – has made the same comeback again. Bradman went on to enjoy another 10 years, albeit interrupted by the second world war, at the top.
His final innings duck is today’s entry point to the Don’s mythology. The sentimental send-off and statistical near-miss is the dessert in the DGB (Don George Bradman) degustation. On to the MCG in early January 1937, from the heat of cricket’s most searing kitchen, Bradman’s main was served. Not just well done. Not just rare.
"Bradman at last," the Sydney Morning Herald wrote. "Back on his throne."
At first glance, England may not have been too impressed by the 124th man to represent Australia in Test cricket.
After all, the diminutive right-handed middle-order batsman with the unorthodox technique made just 18 and 1 batting at No.7 in the opening Test of the 1928-29 Ashes. Bradman was promptly dropped for the second Test.
By series end, he had two centuries and two other fifties but didn't even rate a mention in the Wisden report of England's tour where all the spotlight was on Wally Hammond's batting in a 4-1 series win for the visitors.
Some 18 months later, however, the boy from Bowral's name was on every Englishman's lips as he eclipsed Hammond and scored 974 runs in seven Test innings at a tick above 139 – a record for the most runs in a Test series that still stands all these years later.
For context, Bradman's series aggregate was exactly 200 more runs, in the same amount of innings that Steve Smith scored in his outstanding 2019 Ashes series in England.
Even now, there's not a person alive with a passing interest in cricket who doesn't know the story of that final-innings duck that secured the 99.94 average, or the tale of the young boy hitting a golf ball against the water tank with a single stump.
I was well aware of what happened. However, I wasn't aware of the specifics of the occasion. To me, I fully believe that Bradman should've gotten those 4 runs. It seems to me that these kind of runs scored and the performances will never be replicated or overtaken.