Donald Bradman

A boy and a water tank

Don Bradman grew up in Bowral, a small town in New South Wales, and the story told about his boyhood practice has been repeated so often it has become part of the game's own folklore: a golf ball hit against the curved brick base of a water tank, rebounding at odd angles, hit again with a cricket stump for a bat. Whatever the exact truth of the tale, the hand-eye coordination it is meant to explain was real enough. Bradman made his first-class debut for New South Wales in 1927 and was picked for Australia the following season, making his Test debut against England at Exhibition Ground in Brisbane in 1928, where he scored 18 and 1 and was dropped for the next match.

It did not take long for the selectors to reconsider. By the 1930 tour of England, Bradman was the player the bowlers most feared and the crowds most came to see, and the rest of his career would be spent adding to a body of work that redefined what a batting average could mean.

Headingley, twice

No ground appears more often at the top of Bradman's best innings than Headingley in Leeds. In 1930 he made 334 there, a score that then stood as the highest ever made in a Test, reaching it from 448 balls before he was eventually out; the match was drawn. Four years later, on the same ground, he made 304. Between those two innings alone sits 638 runs on a single strip of turf, and they sit alongside three other scores of 250 or more in his best five innings: 299 not out against South Africa at Adelaide Oval in 1932, a Test Australia won; 270 against England at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in 1937, another win; and 254 against England at Lord's in 1930, a third.

Across his 52 Tests Bradman scored 29 hundreds and 13 fifties from 80 innings, and the concentration of huge scores rather than merely frequent ones is part of what makes the average what it is: even allowing for his ten not-out innings, no batter has piled up centuries of that size so repeatedly.

Bodyline

Bradman's dominance provoked one of the most notorious tactical responses in the sport's history. On the 1932-33 Ashes tour, the England captain Douglas Jardine set fast bowlers, chiefly Harold Larwood, to bowl short at the batter's body with a packed leg-side field, a method that became known as Bodyline. It was designed specifically to blunt Bradman, and by the ugly, dangerous standards of the method it partly worked: his average for that series fell well short of his career mark, though it remained, by any normal measure, formidable. The tactic caused a diplomatic incident between the Australian and English cricket boards and led directly to changes in the laws limiting the number of fielders allowed behind square on the leg side.

Bradman's scorecards against England as a whole, 37 Tests, 5,028 runs at 89.79, show how much of his career was built against the strongest opponent he faced most often, Bodyline series included.

Captain of the Invincibles

Bradman captained Australia in 24 of his 52 Tests, winning 15 and losing only 3, and across his whole career Australia won 30 of the Tests he played, lost 12 and drew 10. His most celebrated side was the one he led to England in 1948, which went through the entire tour, Tests included, without losing a single match, a side still referred to as The Invincibles. Bradman was 39 that summer and past his physical peak, yet the team he built and led remains a byword for a touring side performing at its absolute limit.

His home and away splits tell their own story of consistency rather than home comfort: an average of 98.23 in 33 Tests in Australia against 102.85 in 19 Tests away, the away figure the higher of the two.

Bowled for nought

Bradman's last Test innings, at the Oval in August 1948, has become one of the most retold moments in cricket. He walked out needing only 4 runs to finish his career with a Test average of exactly 100, and the English crowd gave him a standing ovation as he reached the middle. He was bowled by the leg-spinner Eric Hollies for a duck, second ball. It is often said, though it is impossible to verify, that he was too moved by the reception to see the googly clearly. Whatever the reason, the failure to add those four runs is precisely what fixed his average at 99.94 rather than a round 100, and the near-miss is arguably why the number is remembered so exactly rather than rounded off in the way most career figures are.

The numbers

The bare totals: 52 Tests, 80 innings, 10 not outs, 6,996 runs, a highest score of 334, 29 hundreds and 13 fifties, for an average of 99.94. He was overwhelmingly a number three, batting there in 53 of his innings. His best decade by average was the 1940s, 1,903 runs at 105.72 from 15 Tests played either side of the Second World War, though it was the 1930s that carried the bulk of his career, 4,625 runs at 102.78 across 33 Tests. The Melbourne Cricket Ground was his most productive home venue, 11 Tests for 1,671 runs at 128.54. He was also an occasional bowler, taking 2 wickets in the archive at an average of 36.00, with a best of 1 for 8 against West Indies at Adelaide in 1930, in a match Australia won.

Legacy

Bradman was knighted in 1949 for his services to cricket, and remained closely involved with the Australian game as an administrator and selector long after he stopped playing. No later batter has come close to his average over a substantial career; the gap between Bradman and the next best sits at a scale unmatched anywhere else in the sport's statistics. The full scorecards behind every figure above, and Bradman's record match by match, are on his CricArcade player page, and the wider Australia team archive carries the sides he played in and captained. In The Follow-On you can put him at number three in an all-time XI and see how far he carries it.

Sources

• CricArcade player page: full career record, best innings and scorecard links
• ESPNcricinfo: Donald Bradman player profile and Test career statistics
• Wisden Cricketers' Almanack: obituaries and Bradman tribute pieces
• Wikipedia: Don Bradman