Bodyline, the series that rocked cricket
There have been plenty of flashpoints in cricket in the more than 75
years since an England team led by Douglas Jardine and under the
auspices of Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), arrived in Australia.
Harold Larwood |
Even so, few have been as controversial as the 1932/33 ‘Bodyline’
series where Jardine’s despised tactics not only threatened the future
of Test cricket but undermined the bonds of the British Empire.
Jardine, a cold, calculating product of Winchester and Oxford,
devised a strategy of dangerously short-pitched bowling using his two
fast bowlers, Harold Larwood and Bill Voce, to combat Don Bradman,
Australia’s sporting hero of the Depression-ravaged times.
Record books
“The Don” had been rewriting cricket’s record books since his Test
debut in 1928 and when the Australians won the five-Test series 2-1 in
England in 1930, Bradman amassed 974 runs at a batting average of
139.14, an aggregate record that stands to this day.
Jardine’s theory of directing his bowlers to bowl at leg stump and
make the ball rear into the batsman’s body became known as ‘Bodyline’.
When Jardine was appointed England captain for the Australian tour,
one of his former Winchester schoolmasters, Rockley Wilson, is said to
have warned he might win the Ashes but he would lose a dominion in the
process.
Passions became so inflamed that during the third Test at the
Adelaide Oval in January 1933, seething spectators threatened to jump
the fence as anti-English feelings soared.
Bill Woodfull, Australia’s gentlemanly captain, was twice struck by
bumpers and wicket-keeper Bert Oldfield edged a ferocious delivery from
Larwood on to his temple, collapsed beside the pitch and was carried
from the field unconscious.
Immortal
It produced one of the immortal quotes in Test cricket when Woodfull
told the English management: “There are two teams out there, and only
one of them is playing cricket.”
Behind the scenes there were frantic political negotiations to save
the tour and restore frayed diplomatic relations between Britain and
Australia.
The British coalition government’s Dominion Secretary JH Thomas later
described Bodyline as the most troublesome affair of his ministerial
career.
England’s emphatic 4-1 series victory brought both opprobrium and
praise for Jardine.
The campaign curbed Bradman’s batting average to 56.57. He scored
just one century in his four Tests with a series aggregate of 396 runs.
Without the Bodyline series, Bradman would have finished his career
with a Test average of 104.76 instead of 99.94. Larwood, the former
Nottinghamshire coalminer, claimed a series-high 33 wickets at 19.51 but
events soured him.
The 28-year-old paceman never played for England again.
Larwood later migrated to Australia with his wife Lois and his five
daughters and lived in Sydney until his death in 1995, at the age of 90.
Recaptured
Jack Fingleton, who played in three of the Bodyline Tests, echoed the
feelings of others in the Australian team when he later wrote: “I do not
think there was one single batsman who played in most of those Bodyline
games who ever afterwards recaptured his love for cricket.”
It says much for the series that Bodyline remains the only chapter in
cricket’s history that film-makers have thought worth dramatising, with
a television mini-series first broadcast in Australia in 1984.
Jardine resigned as England captain before Australia’s 1934 Ashes
tour and retired from first-class cricket aged 33. That same year MCC
outlawed systematic bowling of fast and short-pitched balls at batsmen
standing clear of their wicket.
Bradman, once lauded as the greatest living Australian, died in
Adelaide on February 25 2001 aged 92, while Jardine died from lung
cancer aged 57, in Montreux, Switzerland, in June 1958.
SYDNEY, Friday (AFP) |