7 July

Watching the cricket, how some balls from great bowlers are near unplayable, and how sometimes luck like a ball keeping low is impossible to control for, I always wondered, how did somebody like Bradman manage to escape those things? And then I wondered - maybe he didn’t. Maybe a much better guide to what his real genius was is found in his median score, not his average. His average of course is the famous 99.94. Almost unbelievable. But his median score? Still the highest in history, just over 56. But that’s a big gap, to his average. He got out to those unplayable balls, just like others did. But it’s what he did when conditions were good for batting that set him apart, he made HUGE scores then. 12 of his 80 innings were over 200. His concentration was unmatched. Second place tells the story, Ken Barrington. Median score of 46. But his average was 58.67. That’s a long way from Bradman’s 99.94, but the medians are much closer. That suggests Barrington was almost as likely to make a high score in any given innings, but Bradman would make enormous scores in a handful of innings. It’s those huge scores that sent his average into the stratosphere. His real genius was his concentration, making the most of good conditions. He often commented that he didn’t understand how other batsmen lost concentration.