Bradman's Best

By Roland Perry, Milsons Point: Random House, 2002, 430 pages, hardback, $49.00. Reviewed by Warwick Franks in the December 2002 issue.

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One of the idle pleasures of following sport is to indulge in the harmlessly futile exercise of selecting best teams. It's harmless because it's a pleasant way of passing the time but futile because of its subjectivity and the vastness of its scope. Cricket devotees in particular draw on the game's Victorian heritage in their mania for classifying, labelling and ordering the impact and skill of the great names of the game. Add a touch of the Elizabethan notion of the great chain of being and mix with millennial fever and we can understand where these books have their origin.

Roland Perry's association with Sir Donald Bradman stretches back to the mid-1990s and bore fruit in his 1998 biography The Don. As Perry tells it, they subsequently discussed Bradman's ideas on his greatest team drawn from a pool of names submitted by Perry, but in deference to Bradman's weariness with publicity his selections were announced posthumously in book form. So, the book consists of a description of the selection process and an essay on each of the twelve players in ht team. As such, there is little that is new or fresh beyond such interest as there is in Bradman's summative judgements late in his life.

Part of the book's weakness stems from the team that Bradman has selected. It is curiously heavy with bowlers and with Don Tallon batting at number six there is a suspiciously long tail that could be vulnerable to any ghostly opposition attack. The Queensland keeper averaged just 17.13 from his 21 Tests and he is followed at number seven by Ray Lindwall (21.12 from 61 Tests) which would surely whet the appetites of any of a dozen bowling shades who would fancy themselves against such a batting house of cards. Even Bert Ironmonger, who was fifty when he played his last Test, would have backed himself to clean up that tail very smartly.

While it is interesting to have Bradman's last thoughts on the subject, Perry's reverential approach turns the process into Moses bringing down the tablets from Mount Sinai. To Perry, Bradman is without spot or stain so that much of his writing, as in the earlier biography, takes on the air of hagiography. As a selector, Bradman is presented as sagacious, prescient and fearless, but his work is never subjected to any critical scrutiny. Take, for example, the peremptory dropping of Clarrie Grimmett from the Test side in 1936-37 immediately after he had taken 44 wickets against the South Africans. He was replaced by Frank Ward who was largely innocuous at the Test level; apart from his six for 102 in the second innings at Brisbane in 1936-37, his other five wickets cost 94.40. Yet Bradman continued to rationalise this dubious selection, using assertion and a curious use of statistics to support a shaky case for destroying the O'Reilly-Grimmett partnership. Then there was the non-selection of Tallon for England in 1938 and the dropping of Keith Miller from the 1949-50 side to South Africa when he was at the peak of his powers.

Bradman's defence, as reported by Perry, is that he was simply part of a group making a decision, but it is disingenuous to emphasise his Olympian qualities and then allow Bradman's claim that he carried no more influence than any other selector to go unexamined. Similarly, the nature of the relationship between Bradman and O'Reilly is left unexplored, as if the notion of discord or difference in the Elysian Fields of cricket of the 1930s is both unthinkable and distasteful and probably part of a curmudgeonly envy of Bradman's success and decency. None of these comments is intended to detract from Bradman's importance and stature in Australian cricket, but an exaggerated and sanitised respect discounts his toughness and distorts his achievement.

A warning signal about this book is sounded by the fact that it contains no bibliography. Such an appendix would have been useful because it might have revealed the source of the factual errors which bedevil the text. These reach a crescendo in the chapter on Tallon which needs thorough checking and revision to remove a large number of inaccurate statements.

Ashley Mallett was an off-spinner of real skill who took 132 wickets in 38 Tests between 1968 and 1980, and who has since written extensively on the game. His approach is more modest yet more revealing: of his twelve players, he played with or against four of them, had professional dealings as a journalist and/or friendships with another seven, while he is the author of the 1985 biography of the last, Victor Trumper. Such knowledge allows him to be particularly insightful about a player such as the idiosyncratic Alan Knott, whose skills and eccentricity are examined thoughtfully.

Mallett uses his insight and knowledge as a Test cricketer but also employs his skills as a writer and researcher to take us beyond mere dressing-room gossip and badinage. His style is serviceable and economical, but books such as these add little to our knowledge of cricket. Mallett has already made valuable contributions to the literature of Australian cricket with his work on Trumper and Grimmett and there are plenty of other significant figures crying out for his skills to be applied to their lives.

Citation

• Warwick Franks. 'Review: Bradman's Best by Roland Perry' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), December 2002. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 20 June 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• Sir Donald Bradman saw all but a few of the 20th Century's greatest cricketers play the game. Apart from being cricket's most successful player and captain, Bradman built a reputation over five decades as the game's most knowledgeable and incisive selector. These factors, combined with his status as one of the legends of world cricket and his unparalleled understanding of cricketing history, put Bradman in a unique position to make the most informed judgment on the composition of the world's all-time best cricket team.
  
  in BRADMAN'S BEST, Sir Donald Bradman reveals his Dream Team, selected from all cricket-playing nations since the first Test was played in 1877. In exclusive interviews and correspondence with his biographer, Roland Perry, Bradman shares his thoughts on the world's best cricketers, his greatest ever team and why he chose its illustrious members.
  
  As well as Bradman's compelling revelations and thoughts on cricket's most celebrated exponents and the way the game has developed over the decades, this long-awaited book also contains engrossing portraits of his selections, who forever will be known as ... Bradman's Best.
  
  'Sir Donald was the best selector I came across in the game anywhere in the world.' Richie Benaud on Sir Donald Bradman

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