After Don Bradman’s triumphant farewell tour in 1948, RC Robertson-Glasgow assessed his career in the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack.
RC Robertson-Glasgow was a Scottish cricketer and cricket writer who wrote for, amongst others, the Daily Telegraph, The Observer and the Sunday Times
Read Gideon Haigh’s Don Bradman tribute
Don Bradman will bat no more against England, and two contrary feelings dispute within us: relief, that our bowlers will no longer be oppressed by this phenomenon; regret, that a miracle has been removed from among us. So must ancient Italy have felt when she heard of the death of Hannibal.
For sheer fame, Dr WG Grace and Don Bradman stand apart from all other cricketers – apart, indeed, from all other games-players. The villagers used to crowd to their doors when WG and his beard drove through their little main street. Bradman, on his visits to England, could never live the life of a private citizen. He couldn’t stroll from his hotel to post a letter or buy a collar-stud. The mob wouldn’t let him. There had to be a car waiting with engine running, and he would plunge into it, like a cork from a bottle.
When cricket was on, Bradman had no private life. He paid for his greatness, and the payment left some mark. The informal occasion, the casual conversation, the chance and happy acquaintance, these were very rarely for him, and his life was that of something between an Emperor and an Ambassador. Yet, for all that, there remained something of that boy who, 30 years before, had knocked a ball or ball-like object about in the backyard of a small house in New South Wales. He never lost a certain primitive and elemental cheekiness, and mingled, as it were, with his exact and scientific calculations, there was the immortal impudence of the gamin.
But, above all, Bradman was a business-cricketer. About his batting there was to be no style for style’s sake. If there was to be any charm, that was for the spectator to find or miss. It was not Bradman’s concern. His aim was the making of runs, and he made them in staggering and ceaseless profusion. He seemed to have eliminated error, to have perfected the mechanism of stroke. Others before him had come near to doing this; but Bradman did it without abating the temperature of his attack. No other batsman, surely, has ever been able to score so fast while at the same time avoiding risk. He was, as near as a man batting may be, the flawless engine.
Most important of all, he steered Australia through some troubled waters and never grounded on the rocks. Returning home, he received the first knighthood ever given to a playing cricketer.
Bradman’s place as a batsman is among the few who have been blessed with genius. He was the most wonderful run-scorer that the game has yet known, and no batsman in our own time has so highly excited expectation and so rarely disappointed it.
