The media houses have gone short of ink when it comes to writing on Sir Donald Bradman. His failures made more roars than astounding success, he made his critics eat humble pie with his scintillating knocks. In total he has hit 19 test centuries against England including 6 double hundreds and 2 triple hundreds, 4 massive hundreds against South Africa and India respectively and 2 Hundred against West Indies, taking the total tally to 29 test centuries in 52 test matches.
He was the leading test run scorer of his time with 6996 runs at an unbelievable average of 99.94, but the question is how good batsman was Sir Donald Bradman on Indian subcontinent pitches. Well the answer is hypothetical because Bradman has not played a single test match on subcontinent pitches. Although, the batting legend played a home series against India and scored 4 centuries against them during the series, but it isn’t the appropriate barometer.
But the batting maestro did play some exhibition warm matches in Sri Lanka between 1929- 1948. Sri Lanka was a traditional stop for the Australian team before reaching the home country of Cricket. Those days the warm-up games were arranged before playing the Ashes, most of the matches were against Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) at the Colombo cricket stadium.
Bradman played 2 first-class games and didn’t score a fifty against the Ceylons. He was consistently troubled by the spin bowling and lost his wicket cheaply on numerous occasions. The Don was out for a first ball duck in the first in the second first-class game he played against Ceylons.
It was evident that Australian batsman doesn’t like batting on slow drifting wicket even till today. Now, look at modern day great Ricky Ponting, who averages on 26 in the Indian subcontinent. So, hypothetically speaking Bradman must have performed exceedingly well on subcontinent pitches, but no way near his actual average of 99.94 in test cricket. It could be around 60, which is no less than an accomplishment for the overseas batsman.
Don Bradman scored centuries against only 4 nations (England, West Indies, South Africa, and India) and all the centuries came against fast bouncy swinging wickets. The Asian spin domination has restricted the overseas nations from conquering the subcontinent. Spin was, is still a mystery for overseas batsmen and Bradman was no exception.
In later years, Bradman himself regretted of never touring Asian countries as a player. He always had high regards for Indian batsman ( giant Indian subcontinent team), he once called Sunil Gavaskar an ornament to cricket, but his all-time favorite was none other than Master Blaster Sachin Tendulkar. Tendulkar always reminded him of his own batting.
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