The best known moment in the career of Australia’s greatest cricketer is glorious failure. 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. And 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.
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. And 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. And 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 degustation. But 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.”
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