The responses to Don Bradman’s dream team have been fascinating. Sunil Gavaskar made a statement saying that he didn’t believe Bradman had chosen such a team because, in Gavaskar’s opinion, a man who had shunned controversy in life would scarcely have wanted to stir it up posthumously. Everyone, from the Indian press to the curator of the Bradman museum in Australia assumed that Gavaskar was sore at being left out. Gavaskar explained that he had made that comment before the final XI was announced, so it wasn’t pique, just an honest opinion.
Whether Gavaskar’s reading of Bradman’s character is right or wrong and whether the list is genuinely Bradman’s or not, it’s worth remembering that when the text of a letter, purportedly written by Bradman, criticizing Australian umpires for no-balling Muralitharan, was made public, Bradman’s family had protested, saying that these posthumous revelations were unauthorized. Knowing this, it was a fair assumption on Gavaskar’s part that this new revelation from the grave was as dodgy as the first one, probably a marketing ploy to sell a book.
The idea that Gavaskar would react like this out of pique is daft. Not because Gavaskar is above petty competitiveness or any reason as lofty like that. Gavaskar was a great batsman and suffers as little from false humility as Bradman did. But like Bradman, Gavaskar tends his aura vigilantly. In fact, had Gavaskar felt badly about being left out of the final XI, he would have done everything possible to mask that reaction because to betray heartburn would be to diminish himself in the public eye.
Gavaskar is circumspect in his public utterances; it’s a characteristic which makes him a bland, even boring television commentator. Even when he offers provocation, it’s carefully pre-meditated. For example, on India’s last tour of Australia, Gavaskar was doing commentary as part of the Channel 9 team. Channel 9’s commentary was telecast all over Australia and the rest of the world but at the end of the day Gavaskar did special telecasts beamed only to India. His criticisms of Australian umpiring (which was atrocious) were vigorous, but typically, they were voiced only on the special broadcasts to India, never in the course of Channel 9 commentary.
I believe Gavaskar when he says that he was reacting to the larger list not the final team. If he had known about Bradman’s final XI, my guess would be that he wouldn’t have said anything at all, because Tendulkar is something of a protégé and Gavaskar wouldn’t want to be seen raining on his parade.
There was another great opening batsman, a contemporary of Gavaskar’s, who was tip-toeing with delight after Bradman’s team was announced. Barry Richards was on television commentating on the India-Sri Lanka test series when he was asked how he felt about being named by Bradman as one of his two opening batsman. It was lovely to see how delighted this grizzled veteran was; it was also poignant because to be picked by Bradman as one of his immortals was some compensation for all the tests he had never played.
My guess is that the team was, in fact, chosen by Bradman because I can’t imagine a forger putting together such a lopsided and idiosyncratic side. Anyone faking a Bradman XI would have to put together a more plausible one. I mean, which faker would have the nerve to choose a side with four specialist batsmen (one of whom has played all of four tests) and a wicketkeeper averaging under twenty runs an innings! It would take the absolute self-assurance of Bradman to assemble a side based, so far as anyone can see, on just two principles, familiarity (all the Australians he chose had played in teams he had captained) and, in the case of Tendulkar, similarity, that is Bradman’s conviction that Tendulkar’s style and technique resembled his own.
What is interesting about our reaction to Bradman’s team is the conviction that he got it wrong, that he should have had Gavaskar or Weekes or Headley or Hobbs in the team. This makes sense only if we assume that Bradman was doing a selection based on a god’s-eye view of test cricket since its inception. He wasn’t; he was making a selection from the players he knew best, players he had watched a lot of, players he had an opinion about, players who had strummed some chord of delight in his cricketing soul.
Think of his team as you would think of a literary anthology. All anthologies make a token attempt to be representative and all anthologies (all the good ones, anyway) represent, in the end, the tastes of the anthologist. This is as it should be, because the reason we attend to Bradman’s team is because we admire Bradman and are interested in his opinions. If we wanted a team based on a dozen parameters of fairness (like the list of the hundred best test centuries in the history of the game) we’d feed the statistics into a machine and print out the results instead of badgering Bradman for his opinions.
What Bradman’s team teaches us is the importance of respecting our own experience. If Gavaskar was asked to name an eleven, he would, of course, survey the history of test cricket, but I’d like to think that he would trust his feelings, his prejudices if you like, and pick eleven players who had thrilled him. Bradman would be one of them (there are some statistics no one can ignore) but, inevitably, most of them would be his peers, men he had played with or against, men whose talents he had admired from close up, men who had stocked his mind with first-hand memories...
Bradman’s team is important because it teaches us the virtues of nostalgia and memory. In its partiality and subjectiveness it reminds us that people who weigh their memories of cricket against some imaginary consensus, some abstract yardstick of fairness, some computer-generated model of the complete cricketer, would be better off watching baseball. For what it’s worth, my all-time team would certainly have Gavaskar opening and, if I felt opinionated enough that day, Vishwanath would waddle in, two wickets down.
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