The Don Was Born

On the 110th birth anniversary, let us remember the Don of cricket. Sir Donald George Bradman graced the game of cricket for twenty long years between 1928 and 1948. The youngest of five siblings, he was born to George and Emily on August 27th, 1908 in Cootamundra in the state of New South Wales in Australia. His grandfather Charles Bradman had migrated from England and settled in New South Wales. Donald was just 12 years old when he hit a century remaining not out at 115 playing for Bowral Public School against Mittigong High School.

There is no ambivalence in the cricketing world over the premise that Sir Don Bradman is the greatest batsman to have ever played the game. I was born more than half a century after he had already hung his boots but it is a testimony to this talismanic Aussie that I know that he needed to score 4 runs in his last test innings to retire with a "bradmanesque" triple digit average. His duck in the last innings is probably the most famous duck in the history of Test Cricket. Nevertheless, a career average of 99.94 is something which, in all probabilities, will remain unbreachable for any batsman of contemporary times and in the future.

You knew he was coming. It was an era, when the fall of the first Australian wicket spelt catastrophe for the bowlers. Celebrations were muted, and voices hushed, in the face of their inevitable doom. The spectators would be clapping, not for the man going off, or the bowler; the applause was one of anticipation. The Don was coming. - Rishi Roy (Cricbuzz)

A Look at Don's Career

In 52 Test matches over 20 years and a World War, Sir Don Bradman transcended the pinnacle of batsmanship, and then some, to an extent that is deemed insurmountable to this day. He was often revered as a god in Australian cricket and went on to form a team that came to be known as the Invincibles. As opposed to the asymptotic greats, The Don was so far beyond the everyday batsman that more than a hundred years on, there isn’t a player who has come within an arm's distance of his Test average - Ninety-nine point nine four.

Donald Bradman's Career (Source - ESPNCricinfo)

From the Pages of Wisden

"He's out!" - to the thousands who read them, whether they were interested in cricket or not, the two words blazoned across the London evening newspaper placards could have meant only one thing: somewhere, someone had managed to dismiss Don Bradman, of itself a lifelong claim to fame.

Sir Donald George Bradman was, without any question, the greatest phenomenon in the history of cricket, indeed in the history of all ball games. To start with, he had a deep and undying love of cricket, as well, of course, as exceptional natural ability. It was always said he could have become a champion at squash or tennis or golf or billiards, had he preferred them to cricket. The fact that, as a boy, he sharpened his reflexes and developed his strokes by hitting golf ball with a cricket stump as it rebounded off a water tank attests to his eye, fleetness of foot and, even when young, his rare powers of concentration.

Bradman himself was of the opinion that there were other batsmen, contemporaries of his, who had the talent to be just as prolific as he was but lacked the concentration. Stan McCabe, who needed a particular challenge to bring the best of him, was no doubt one of them. "I wish I could bat like that", Bradman's assessment of McCabe's 232 in the Trent Bridge Test of 1938, must stand with W.G.'s "Give me Arthur" [Shrewsbury], when asked to name the best batsman he had played with, as the grandest tribute ever paid by one great cricketer to another.

So, with the concentration and the commitment and the calculation and the certainty that were synonymous with Bradman, went a less obvious but no less telling humility. He sought privacy and attracted adulation.

How did anyone ever get him out? The two bowlers to do it most often, if sometimes at horrendous cost, were both spinners - Clarrie Grimmett, who had ten such coups to his credit with leg-breaks and googlies, and Hedley Verity, who also had ten, eight of them for England. Is there anything, I wonder, to be deduced from this? Both, for example, had a flattish trajectory, which may have deterred Bradman from jumping out to drive, something he was always looking to do.

Grimmett was not, in fact, the only wrist-spinner to make the great man seem, at times, almost mortal. Bill O'Reilly was another - Bradman called him the finest and therefore, presumably, the most testing bowler he played against - as were Ian Peebles and Walter Robins; and it was with a googly that Eric Hollies bowled him for a duck in his last Test innings, at The Oval in 1948, when he was within four runs of averaging 100 in Test cricket. Perhaps, very occasionally, he did have trouble reading wrist-spin; but that, after all, is its devious purpose.

By his own unique standards, Bradman was discomfited by Bodyline, the shameless method of attack which Douglas Jardine employed to depose him in Australia in 1932-33. Discomfited, yes - but he still averaged 56.57 in the Test series. If there really is a blemish on his amazing record it is, I suppose, the absence of a significant innings on one of those "sticky dogs" of old, when the ball was hissing and cavorting under a hot sun following heavy rain. This is not to say he couldn't have played one, but that on the big occasion, when the chance arose, he never did.

His dominance on all other occasions was absolute. R. C. Robertson-Glasgow called the Don "that rarest of Nature's creatures, a genius with an eye for business." He could be 250 not out and yet still scampering the first run to third man or long leg with a view to inducing a fielding error. Batsmen of today would be amazed had they seen it, and better cricketers for having done so. It may be apocryphal, but if, to a well-wisher, he did desire his 309 not out on the first day of the Headingley Test of 1930 as a nice bit of practice for tomorrow, he could easily have meant it.

He knows as well as anyone, though, that with so much more emphasis being placed on containment and so many fewer overs being bowled, his 309 of 70 years ago would be nearer 209 today. Which makes it all the more fortuitous that he played when he did, by doing so, he had the chance to renew a nation and reinvent a game. His fame, like W.G.'s, will never fade.

- Wisden Cricketers' Almanack

Sachin Remembers Bradman on his Birthday

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Personally, I remember the greatest batsman of all time on his 110th birth anniversary. I also hope that more and more batsmen try to come close to his records so that we, as cricket

romantics, will be able to witness something out of this planet in the coming future, as well.