BODY-LINE ATTACK

Taranaki Daily News, 11 March 1933, Page 7

BODY-LINE ATTACK

HOW BRADMAjN, TRIED TO BEAT IT.

Don Bradman has not succeeded in mastering the English bowling this season, but that is not because he has not thought deeply on the best means of scoring from it. .This is characteristic of Bradman, for ever since his entry into first-class cricket he has been a thinker, says the Australian Sporting Globe, and, in his earlier days, at any rate, never hesitated to seek advice when he found himself at fault against any particularbowler or type of bowling. He fully realises his inability to handle the body-line bowling of the Englishmen, which he knows was thought out largely with the idea of bringing him down, and he has shown that he has no intention of being knocked about by it if he can avoid it.

Some of the criticisms of him for his method of trying to play it, however, are regarded by him and many of his friends as unfair.

For instance, his method of stepping back and trying to hit/the bowling of Larwobd to the off, which has cost him his wicket several times, has been adversely criticised, but it seems to have been a deliberately thought-out plan by him to cope with a method of attack that had beaten him. H- realised that he’ could not stand up to the body-line form of bowling without danger to himself, and he thought out the plan of stepping back and.hitting the ball right through the covers as the most likely one to enable him to beat the tactics of the bowlers. < ' . ,

To help him in the plan he has sometimes taken block outside the leg stump. In trying it he has not made it a rigid rule to step back to every ball, for sometimes he has stepped into his wicket with the idea of getting the bowler guessing as to what he will do. By the adoption of this plan he has, with the aid of his wonderful eye and wrist work, brought off some great cover shots, but has not met with the success that he hoped for, for he had lost his wicket more than once; but the fact that he thought but this way of beating the bowlers and had the courage to try it, is to his credit.