England regained the ‘Ashes’ this week, on 24 August, after their fifth cricket test match against Australia, played at The Oval in London.
By winning this five-match ‘Ashes 2015’ series, 3-2, they got the trophy back from the touring Australians.
But, as I watched the news, somehow, my mind went back to the traditional over-a-century-old England-Australia cricket rivalry.
It had, actually, given rise to the very term ‘Ashes’ since 1882, when an English newspaper had written a mock obituary stating that English cricket had died, and that "the body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia"!
My mind particularly went back to England’s role in Ashes 1932-1933 series. A series about which I had read much, and I had watched much. And I now thought it might worth a revisit by us.
Almost a century has passed since that controversial tour of Australia by English cricketers, but the 1932-1933 series, which had caused a huge diplomatic upheaval, will always be remembered for the revisions of the laws of Cricket it had soon evoked.
I remember watching ‘Bodyline’, a wonderfully-made BBC mini-series on television that showed the controversy surrounding the strategy of England’s Captain Douglas Jardine of having his bowlers use some completely ungentlemanly tactics to get the great batsman Don Bradman out.
Jardine’s attack was a revenge-seeking one because, earlier in 1930, England had lost the series to the touring Australians.
And the Australian Don Bradman, during that time, was riding high on the crest of his career.
In fact, Australia had, in 1930, won the five-Test series 2–1, with Don Bradman scoring 974 runs at a batting average of an astounding 139.14, an aggregate record that still stands, even today.
By 1932-33, Bradman's average had hovered around 100, approximately twice that of all other world-class batsmen of that time. Then aged 24, Bradman clearly was not going to retire anytime soon.
Therefore, he became the prime target of the English bowlers.
Apparently, as soon as Jardine was named captain for the 1932–33 English tour of Australia, Jardine met up with his two fast bowlers Harold Larwood and Bill Voce at London's Piccadilly Hotel to discuss a plan to combat Bradman's extraordinary skills.
They knew that Bradman gets uncomfortable facing deliveries which bounced higher than usual at a faster pace, and that he would step back out of the line of the ball.
And thus was born a new form of bowling delivery called “Bodyline” created by them. The ball was bowled close to, or at, the batsman.
It was bowled towards the body of the batsman on the line of the leg stump, in the hope of creating leg-side deflections that could be caught by one of the several fielders in the quadrant of the field behind square leg.
The English wanted to reduce Bradman’s scoring, or get him out, but this dangerous bowling had actually led to a large number of serious injuries on the Australian team.
England won the series 3-1. But it made Australians bitter. And what followed was a huge protest that strained England-Australia relations. Soon cricket laws were revised and Bodyline bowling tactics were banned soon after the series.
An occasional short-pitched ball aimed at the batsman (called a bouncer) has never been illegal and is still in widespread use as a tactic.
But a direct bodyline delivery is just not cricket, which is, after all, a gentleman’s game.
