The Bodyline series remembered

UMPIRE's POST

The perception of the notorious Bodyline series, which started exactly 75 years ago last week, is undergoing an overhaul. Was it really as bad as made out to be?

The notoriety of the series is derived more from its milieu. The strategy was not exactly unheard of: known as leg theory, it had been around for decades, but was not popular. Secondly, English captain Douglas Jardine's cussedness and his fast and accurate bowlers, spearheaded by Harold Larwood and Bill Voce, took it to another level.

The ploy was hatched by Jardine to win back the Ashes, the key to which was curbing the young and free-stroking Bradman. According to folklore, the inspiration came when Bradman was once seen wincing when struck on the body.

Thus, on the tour to Australia in 1932-33, Jardine used his bowlers to attack the body of the batsmen, not the stumps, in an era when the only protection they had was the abdomen guard. With no restriction on the number of fielders on the leg side, Jardine packed it with six fielders forming an arc around the batsman between short fine leg and forward short leg.

The crisis point was reached when Larwood struck Bill Woodfull, the Australian captain, over the heart and then Bert Oldfield on the head, fracturing his skull. However, neither injury came when Larwood was bowling Bodyline.

Ever since, Jardine has been presented as a monster by the media, which he never tried to befriend ("I'm here to win the Ashes, not provide scoops for your ruddy newspapers").

However, the monster needed an opponent as pliable as Woodfull to spread his reign. Latter-day Aussie captains like the Chappells, Border and Steve Waugh would balk at it but not once did Woodfull try to fight fire with fire (even rookie Robin Uthappa knows the phrase). On the contrary, he is understood to have looked severely on Bradman's response of moving to leg to put the ball through the sparsely populated off.

With time, many of the wounds have healed and bigger ones opened. The summer following Bodyline, West Indies' Learie Constantine and Manny Martindale tried the tactic on England. A mere two decades later, Larwood even settled in Sydney. In the 1970s, first Australia and then West Indies took hostile fast bowling to far greater heights than Jardine could have envisioned.

Five years ago, Jardine's rehabilitation was more or less complete. The cover of the Wisden Cricket Monthly in February 2002 acclaimed Nasser Hussain as showing "Shades of Jardine" in his deployment of a leg-side attack to restrain Sachin Tendulkar "" who Bradman thought batted just like him "" at Bangalore.