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The most famous duck in history

Exactly half a century ago this month, Don Bradman played his last innings in Test cricket. It lasted all of two balls, the first played defensively, the second sneaking past the bat to disturb the off stump. Were he to have hit the first ball for four, and still been bowled off the next, Bradman would have averaged a round hundred in his Test career.

There are some who claimed that the occasion got to Bradman, that the ovation from the Oval crowd and from the England team (who gave him three cheers) had disturbed his cool and characteristic equanimity.

It was even suggested that his eyes were clouded over with tears. How else would this master of slow bowling have missed the googly from Eric Hollies, a honest but never threatening trundler?

But this sentimental nonsense was dismissed by the fielding captain, Norman Yardley. The great man, he said, both came to the wicket and left it in good humour, knowing that his side were in command (England had been dismissed in their first innings for 52), that Arthur Morris was well set at 55 not out and that the prolific Neil Harvey and Keith Miller were still to come in. To be sure, Australia went on to win by an innings.

In a test career spanning twenty years and eighty innings, Bradman made seven ducks. Remarkably, two of these came in successive knocks. In the second innings of the first Test of the 1936-7 Ashes series, the Australian captain fell to his English counterpart, G.O. Allen, for a duck. That was at Brisbane. In the next Test at Sydney, he was caught Alen bowled Voce zero. Australia lost the first match by 322 runs and the second by an innings and 22.

Now, if you profane the Gods you should expect swift retribution. Bradman's scores in the Test that remained were 13 and 270, 26 and 212, and 169. Need one add that his side won all three?

Bradman's first duck, however, was made (if that is the word!) at Sydney on the 3^rd of March 1931. Australia were playing the West Indies, in the winter following Bradman's first, triumphant tour of England (when he had scored 974 runs in five Tests, a record still unbroken).

In the fourth innings of the match, the home side needed only 251 to win, but on a crumbling wicket. After two brilliant catches by Learie Constantine had got rid of the openers, Bradman came in. At 49 for 2, the fate of the match hung on his blade. The bowler, Herman Griffith, gave him two short ones outside the off stump, then two outside leg.

Bradman let them all go, but had to wait as Constantine sent down an immaculate maiden to the other batsman (Alan Kippax). Six minutes at the wicket, and the Don was still not off the mark. Now Griffith teased him further, by bowling the next two also wide of the wickets. These were followed by a fast yorker on middle stump which the impatient Bradman swiped at and missed.

Learie Constantine always maintained that Griffith's dismissal of Bradman was a key moment in Caribbean history. Its immediate consequence was that the West Indians went on to win their first Test on foreign soil. Beyond this, it showed to the cricketing world that the black man's game was not merely a product of instinct and impulse. For the batsman who scored 223 and 152 in the two previous Tests had been comprehensively out-thought by his opponent.

AS Constantine remarks, it was not through blind speed but through 'brain-work' that Herman Griffith got rid of Bradman. Cricketing craft and skill were no longer the monopoly of the Australian or the Englishman alone.

The scene of the Don's next blob in Test cricket was the Melbourne Cricket Ground. It was the second match of the Bodyline series of 1932-'33, and Bradman had missed the first Test due to a dispute over terms with his Board. In his absence, Australia had been bumped and bounced to defeat, so when he walked to the wicket at the MCG the air was surcharged with anticipation. To quote a man who was there, "The inimitable Don came in to bat amid cheering as I had never heard before. Every step he took towards the wicket was cheered, and Bradman, a cunning campaigner, came from the darkness of the pavilion, and walked towards the wicket in a huge semi-circular tour. He was giving the crowd time to quieten and also accustoming his dyes to the glare."

This eyewitness was none other than Bill Bowes, the man due to bowl to Bradman. The cheering continued as the batsman took guard, and intensified when Bowes ran up to the bowling crease. The Don "stepped across the wicket intending to hit the ball out of sight." But as the cherry came towards him he realized that it was not a bouncer aimed at his head but a delivery of full length. Too late, he changed his stroke, only to get a faint edge that deflected the ball on to his stumps.

A first-ball duck for the hero of all Australia. "The crowd was stupefied," remembered Bill Bowes in his autobiography. "Bradman walked off the field amid a silence that would have been a theatrical producer's triumph. The spell was broken by a solitary woman's clapping. The feeble sound rippled above the hushed throng, and then an excited chatter broke out from all parts of the ground. And it was then that I noticed (my captain Douglas) Jardine. Jardine, the sphinx, had forgotten himself for the one and only time in his cricketing life. In his sheer delight at this unexpected stroke of luck, he had clasped both his hands above his head and was jigging around like an Indian doing a war dance."

That ball was the biggest moment of Bill Bowes' career, and it comes as no surprise that he expends no ink on Bradman's second knock (a hundred, of course).

Next, in chronological order, come those twin failures against Allen's side in 1936-'37. Ten years later, Bradman was bowled for a duck in Adelaide, playing over a late inswinger from Alec Bedser. This must be read as a sign of the man's stern impartiality. He had scored hundreds everywhere in Australia, so why be choosy with his defeats? One duck apiece at Brisbane, Melbourne, and Adelaide, but two at the Sydney Cricket ground, since he was by birth a New South Welshman. None at Perth, but then no Test matches were played there in those days.

No Indian, we may be certain, watched any of Bradman's five blobs at home, but there just might have been one or two homesick and anti-colonial students present at the Oval when he was bowled second ball by Eric Hollies.

I do know, though, that one of our countrymen witnessed the Don's first innings of the 1948 series. Devadas Gandhi, editor of the Hindustan Times, was in England that summer on business. When a Fleet Street colleague asked him what he would like to do when his work was done Gandhi answered, 'See Bradman bat'.

Through the wires that newspapermen so effectively pull, he was sent a ticket for the second day of the Nottingham Test. Unfortunately, all the hotels were full up, but the editor resourcefully found himself a bed in Nottingham prison (one would expect a son of the Mahatma to befriend a British jailor.) After breakfast with the convicts, he proceeded to Trent Bridge. Bradman came in to bat shortly after lunch, and played through two sessions, to be 130 not out at the close. Luckily, Gandhi was back in London when Bradman scored zero the second time around. He was caught at leg slip off Alec Bedser, who thus became the only man to dismiss the Don twice for a duck in Tests.

In between the blob at Nottingham and the vastly more famous blob at the Oval, Bradman scored 39 and 89 in the Lord's Test, 7 and 30 not out at Old trafford, and 33 and 173 not out at Headingley when his side scored 403 for 4 to win the match. All in all, it was a triumphant exit from the cricketing stage, as captured in the title of Jack Fingleton's evocative book on the tour, Brightly Fades the Don.

The Australians had retained the Ashes with the greatest of ease, and Bradman had himself shown that, at forty, he could still bat with the best. Through the summer he and his team had swept all before them. True, he unexpectedly failed the last time he batted in a Test match, but this only went to show (to quote Fingleton) that 'as the game gives, so the game takes away'.

That the lore of cricket has dwelt so fully on Bradman's failures is the true measure of the man's unique status in the history of the game. We know as much about his zeroes as his centuries or triple centuries. But who now remembers the brilliant, chanceless, and matchwinning 196 that Arthur Morris hit in the same innings of the 1948 Oval Test?

In recent months there has been talk, often loose talk, of how Sachin Tendulkar is as good a batsman as Don Bradman once was. But tell me, will they be talking and writing of his ducks fifty years hence?

Ramachandra Guha