Was there a golden era of test cricket? If so, when?

[sussexpob]

I set this thread up mostly to accommodate an ongoing discussion I was having with AC that has polluted the Indian Cricket thread. That discussion originally asked whether Ravi Jadeja can be considered an all time great for his record, and whether or not he deserves his place in the Indian all time XI - I said yes, Adi and AC think not... mostly because the relative weakness in modern day cricket making this current era easier to perform in.

The discussion moved on the relative strengths of eras, and whether or not there can be considered a golden era for test cricket, or whether its possible to even measure such a thing. I argued that the often cited golden era of test cricket, the Bradman era, was arguably the worst era in test history for a number of different reasons, and that his average is a symptom of the low quality of test cricket at the time. AC disagreed...

I wondered what other people thought about it in terms of where they see the current game in comparison to its zenith years, when those years are, and why they think that. Feel free to join the discussion.

The last posts to give some context....from AC. This was in reply to my suggestion that the Bradman era was noticeably weak (see Indian Cricket thread for further context if you are interested).

It's an interesting and persuasive point of view. Especially about the war dead. Though the Don played for many years after that must have no longer been a factor. The lost generation was soon replaced. South Africa I think were a decent side back then. And I'm not sure it all explains why Bradman was so much more successful than anyone else.

The players who grew up in that era and played in the 50s and 60s and became the commentators of my youth, never gave any impression that the Invincibles were a ordinary players made to look good by low general standards. But maybe that's human nature.

But most importantly, I feel sentimentally attached to our shared past, and I don't feel emotionally up to the job of writing off a two generations of cricketers who lived and dreamed! I accept this may not be realistic. And maybe this is just the beginning of my elderly sensibilities. As I say, you make some excellent points though!

I sometimes forget how popular cricket once was, because now it is is a minority sport in UK. Between the wars, cricket was the summer sport and everyone knew who the players were and it was widely played for recreation in towns and villages. Particularly in the north. Even in my lifetime, the Yorkshire league was said to be of a high standard.

With all that cricket being played, and with the benefits of avoiding working in heavy industry, it's possible that standards were higher than we now expect. Cricket wasn't professional in the way we think of it now- players had winter jobs- but the talent pool was much bigger. Anecdotes about whistling down a mine for a fast bowler are fanciful, but may hold a germ of truth.

The footage that exists of Larwood doesn't look like a medium pacer at work. As I've mentioned before, I think he looks like a- shorter- Brett Lee. And I remember when even in middle age, Devon Malcolm was still the fastest bowler in England, suggesting there modernity hadn't brought a democratisation of pace and that real speed is unusual and personal. Malcolm was a graduate of the Derbyshire leagues, not elite coaching.

I say this not to defend the past, but to suggest that the truth might not be found in a relatively extreme view..

[sussexpob]

Its undoubtably true that the zenith of the games popularity in both Ashes countries reached a zenith in/around the Bradman era (it started slightly earlier, and finished a series or two after his retirement, to be specific), but it would be false to assume that this had any impact on the quality of the game in England.

Cricket was built on the beliefs of amateurism, and its upper class administrators were determined for that to remain in place. When the Football Association created competitive sporting competition in 1871 with the FA Cup, it became obvious that a simple knockout tournament where the majority of clubs only played 1 or 2 games before their seasons ended, did not come close to wetting the appetite in the public for competitive sport - in 1888, the Football league was created to facilitate week in/week out competitive sport, and a pyramid that democracised any club having the potential to be successful; cricket did so with the county championship, but rejected the idea of giving any official meaning to anything outside the realm of historical county or school games, and club cricket was given no official status or meaning purposefully. Playing in a structure of relegation/promotion or cup competitions eroded the class built idea of sport being about winning and and not just to take part - so cricket fought against the opportunties for growth as a national game that were presented to it on a plate at this time, it did not embrace them at all, very much the opposite. To cricket in the 1890s, they feared having working class plebs playing on their hallowed turf more than they cared about winning crowds.

You see this in the source material of the time, particularly in the period after 1900 to World War I. Commentators on the game hated the county championship, and believed it crushed the golden era of cricket. The most cited reason was batsman no longer cared about entertaining with array of strokes, and just blocked for overs on end not wanting to lose wickets (oh the irony!!) and to build maximum scores. There is evidence that this really upset crowds, and attendances in traditional upper class quarters waned. Professional cricketers were frowned up in this era, and most professionals were forced out to the club circuit to make a living, where they could do so if they were very good because the convention was to pay a small wage from the gate to elite players, and then the crowd would supplement it with a whip round for the man of the match or for noteworthy good performance in matches, the money rewarded to the players in question. Most "professional" cricketers therefore operated under the radar of county cricket because unless you were independantly wealthy, you had very, very little chance at a career at the top level.

The best example is Sydney Barnes, considered the greatest pre-war player, and by some as the best bowler ever..... he hardly played a county game, instead playing in the Yorkshire leagues or minor counties for the majority of his career. Its worth noting at this point that the rules made it very, very difficult to change from your county of birth or residency.... you couldn't find a county to contract with, you had to be born in the county or lived there for a number of years, and where leagues were strongest also tended to have the strongest amateur contingents (like Yorkshire for instance).

The most important change came in the First World war. I cannot remember its name (CCC or LCC) but an organisation that came to represent all clubs across the country voted to ban both league structures and cup competitions in the club game, and this covered all the country save for where the working class pit workers had formed clubs and refused to join - Yorkshire, Lancs, Notts and Derbyshire I believe retained meritocratic league structures, but elsewhere clubs enshrined amaterusim and elitism into the club structure. They did this for two reasons - 1. To stave off the increasing interest of competitive sport in the country, and to save the value of amateurism and 2. Because the War had created calls for a more egalitarian class system, which cricket outright rejected. They did not want the working class plebs in the game. They did everything they could to avoid them.

The effect on the quality of sides can be easily show in the trend of results; save for Middlesex's 2 wins at the end of WWI, which are attributed to the temporary move to 2 day First class games (which meant northern teams got screwed by more rain, as the points table was based on win percentage not points, so many lopsided unfinished draws hurt Yorkshire/Lancs) and the fact they retained the most alive players after the war, we enter a period where no CC is won by a county that signed up to the ban of league and cup cricket until 1947.Lancs/Yorkshire with the biggest league systems utterly dominate English cricket. We could say this is all chance occurrance, but the post WWII developments really rammed home how much England were self-inflicting pain on themselves. 1948 is a watershed moment for English cricket; Bradman's invincibles went a whole first class season undefeated against both England and every single county they played, and to add insult to injury, the County Championship was won by a Welsh county that fell outside of the scope of English cricket at the time. This is, arguably, also the point of cricket's strongest public profile in mainstream English culture, so this summer sent shockwaves down the English game. While many counties resisted the pressure to change and tried to cling onto amateurism, the London counties broke away from the accord to ban club cricket competitions.... and low and behold what happened? By 1959, Middlesex won 2 championships, Surrey won 7 outright and 1 shared.....

Or to put it more simply, the self-defeating banning of club competitions leads to an instantenaous domination of 2-3 northern counties, its retraction leads to an instantaneous domination from the two counties that bucked the trend, and the net effect of England's most populous area being opened up for club cricketers to become more meritocratic leads to England winning 3 Ashes series for the first time since Australia have been competitive in the sport, losing only one test in 15 and a period of domination for the national team. If this is a co-incidence, its a hell of a co-incidence.

Its hard for me to really acknowledge anything that occurs in Bradman's era as being indicative of the state of cricket between both sides, because English cricket quite literally had no interesting in winning during this era. The preservation of amateurism was the primary goal of cricket, and defined everything in the output of English cricket of the time. The administrators in the game were vocal; cricket should not be about winning. When put against a system that was all about winning, its hardly comparable. Had Bradman been born in Sussex to working class pareetns, he'd probably never have got a game in the annual Sussex Gents v Toff United.... and he would have been prevented from playing in Yorkshire where he might get a game.

Even those that broke through the class system had challenges. A lot of the time the professionals contracts were only limited to amateuristic tendencies- take for Example Larwood. His professional contract at Yorkshire paid him the exact amount he made at the mine he grew up working at.... not a penny more. It was thought that if it was acceptable to pay someone to play as part of the rules, then they shouldnt be paid to earn a good living, only to replace what they would earn if they still went to work. Many professionals that made it big had to find other revenue streams elsewhere.... Sutcliffe for instance tried to use his status as a key test player to open a sports goods shop to make money.

Finally, there is also some evidence that in club systems like Yorkshire, to get passed the filter of amateurism at the county level required a mix of luck and someone looking out for you. I can't remember every single player-club crossover, but Pudsey as a town for instance is one example of a small place which produced a lot of players, and that local connection benefitted a lot of players.. but these players made it because they had someone at Yorkshire pressing their case. Sutcliffe is a big reason Hutton got a chance, Hutton was a major reason Trueman got a chance, and so on. I have seen it argued quite convincingly that the scary thought about this period of Yorkshire cricket is, its debatable whether the best professional players who came out of the Yorkshire leagues and broke into county cricket were even close to being the best performers in those leagues, and that you could make a case some Yorkshire players who went on to have very good county/test careers wouldn't even have gotten into a Yorkshire or Bradford League XI of their time. Some players got lucky, others did not... and some, like Barnes, simply got paid more in club cricket than in county cricket, so remained there to make a living.

[sussexpob]

I guess this does not really answer the question of why Bradman was so good relative to his peers. I guess that defaults to the obvious point that he was by far the best talent of his generation, the point is to not ruin Bradman's legacy as such, but to qualify the astronomical average as being from a very different team, one that I believe does not represent Bradman as being the pinnacle example of a cricketer across eras. Its not provable of course, but as I said, I would be surprised if Bradman teleported to now would do much in modern cricket. He isn't the exception that proves the rule that he represents the golden era.

One area that there is some historical and statistical questions is LBWs. England used to tour with professionals doubling as journalists, and on more than one tour in this era, English players complained about unfair umpiring when lbws were concerned. For that they receieved much scorn and abuse from Aussie crowds who would follow accusations of bad umpiring or home bias with chants of "liars" when England players came out to bat, but its interesting looking at Bradman's stats that in an era where defending your stumps accounted for about 50% of dismissals, and was statistically a historical highpoint for bowled and lbw decisions, Bradman has almost a complete absence of lbw decisions.

His 32.5% of bowled dismissals is historically massive, so relative to his own ability, we cannot dismiss it as simply being excellence in protecting his stumps. Looking further into this... (a) he was never given out lbw in an Ashes game in Australia....(b) In 4 of the 5 innings he was given LBW he was already passed 100, and averaged well over 150 runs over those innings when given out...(c) Was given out lbw in 1948, his only Ashes lbw, when the series was pretty much dead and the match was heading for a rain affected draw.

Not only does such a high bowled percentage rarely exist, but combined with so few lbws, it makes it pretty unbelievable. The two go together, as represent the same technical error or difficulties in pitches. And the lbw law was changed early in Bradman's career which increased the number of lbws to modern numbers.

Lets just say a skeptic might suggest this insane stat might be to do with with the fact the umpire wasn't being entirely objective when 120,000 fans had lined up for a day to catch a glimpse of the Don batting, only for him to be wrapped on the pad first ball. No one wanted to see him walk back to the pavilion, did they? We all know what happened in 32-33 when England did wreck the 2 day Bradman batting party for the crowd.....

[andy]

I went for the rise of the windies

[Gingerfinch]

Impossible to answer. From a purely selfish point, the 90's, with the likes of Lara, Tendulkar, Warne, Muarli, Mark Waugh, Waqar and Wasim around. England were mainly average of course.

[Arthur Crabtree]

West Indies of around the turn of the 70s/80s are the best side I've seen, largely because of their incredible attack, plus Viv. I accept though that they didn't have a spinner and their record in Asia was sketchy. Pakistan were strong and India were hard to beat at home. SA would have been hard to beat. English domestic cricket was of a high quality with an incredible array of international talent strengthening the counties.

There will always be dominant teams and that's expected. But the early noughties was a time when the game across the world was strong. Australia were the best, but SA were formidable, England resurgent under Fletcher, SL had their peak side. NZ and even Zimbabwe drew a good performance. And India were hard to beat at home... I'll pick that as the strongest generally, and a time of real legends.

Test cricket was still valued then in a way it isn't anymore. The great game has been knocked about in the past five years. Some of it because the world has changed. I don't think the administrators have really fought for it either.

But limited overs cricket is in a golden age.

[Arthur Crabtree]

My guess is that the idea of a cricket golden age was the nostalgia of depression and wartime writers wistfully remembering a whole social era which was thought of as a golden age. The Edwardian era before the great depression, and the promise of young people who died in trenches.

Maybe the journalist class remembered a gentler time when people knew their place and players deferred to gentlemen in a way that would no longer seem so appropriate to us now.

Given the crazy scorecards of Edwardian cricket, and the amateur status of the times, it seems likely that the game wouldn't look that familiar to us now. But I don't have a problem with regarding cricket from the time of Bradman onwards as being a good standard, including for reasons I mentioned before. Give or take the equipment. The major caveat is there were only three sides and Asian cricket had barely started.

[Arthur Crabtree]

Anyway... I voted for the Waugh years.

[Arthur Crabtree]

A final broader point (before I read the previous posts!) Are we not often naively disrespectful of the past? The thirties gave us myriad forms of jazz and folk. And the sophistication of Cole Porter, Astaire and Rogers and Ernst Lubitsch. There was Einstein and Freud. There was TS Eliot and John Steinbeck. And modernism. Picasso and Braque. It was time of great political conviction, for good and bad. There was no social media. So OK, people can run faster now. But is that so much in a sport of wit and learning?

[Arthur Crabtree]

Interesting read.

Did Bodyline not suggest England were willing to win at all costs? Wasn't the amateur code just hypocrisy?

Umpiring has been biased right up until hawkeye. I remember very biased English umpires. If Bradman was given the benefit of the doubt in Australia, wouldn't he get a few rough ones in England and SA?

And doesn't the frighteningly exalted standards of the Yorkshire league in the mid-century make my point about a high base because of mass participation. Sounds like India now.

[Arthur Crabtree]

Though the population of India is somewhat greater!

[sussexpob]

Did Bodyline not suggest England were willing to win at all costs? Wasn't the amateur code just hypocrisy?

I think that is two very different questions....

Taking the latter first, amateurism was just an attempt to keep the game from becoming meritocratic, and within the social confines of upper classes control. Those professionals who entered the game did so being treated as a sub-class with seperation of classes on every level when not on the field, and were mindful of the fact their existence in the game was wholly down to the patronage of those above them, who could (and often did) end careers at their whim. Cricket as such, became an open affirmation of the class system.

For that reason I do not think it is greatly important whether or not it was hypocritical. Games might have been played in a spirit of fierce competition, but the pretence of it not being played on that basis of winning was used regularly as an argument against further professionalism and to tear down the reputation of those professionals who did well, and became a consistent barrier to lower classes being acknowledged in the sport. So amateurism served its purpose in keeping the game clean of those people the upper class did not want to be there. As I said above, upper class leagues in the South rejected the invasion of competition, so as to keep the game in its most traditional form.

So in the context of the point, it doesnt make a difference in my opinion. The fact is, elite cricket in the country was administered and run at the whims and political aims of the elite classes, and working class participation was allowed/tolerated at controlled levels. And never as equals, regardless of career success.

As for bodyline.....

I think its the same thing. The Ashes series between World Wars were played out in a very different world. The British Empire was in decline, Australia as an Independent nation wanted to be acknowledged. Ashes series were concieved as much as a carnival of Empire soft power as much as a cricket tour. The social values and morals England teams represented were played up as a key element. Could there be anything more of a danger to this than being beaten badly by an upstart nation you used to, or still did, consider inferior? I guess it would have been bad optics for an elite class to go play a load of working class boys at their own game and get their bottoms handed to them on a plate... so was it about the sporting result, or more the social results, that become more important?

Either way, a lot is made of Bodyline tactics, but much of it is mythological. The series is often treated in historical isolation, without any reference to the contemporary cricketing culture... Bodyline was only one tactic that emerged out of plenty of controversial ones, much of which would make modern day audience laugh. Bowling outside of 4th stump to enduce edges was seen as negative and unworthy of amateur players. Playing defensive and grinding runs was the same. The most bizarre was leg side scoring, which was also seen as a cheap way of winning - many sides in the English county game fielded everyone on the offside and if a batsman hit the ball on the onside, they were expected to decline a run. Bowlers were expected to bowl at he stumps, Batsman were expected to dazzle everyone with their strokes and get on with it with an exhibition of trying to hit.

You have to think that Australia paid no reverence to any of this. Its noted quite a lot in historical records that Bradman on the 1930s tour hooked, pulled and glanced a lot into the leg side and took runs without question. For amateurs in England, that would have been seen as controversial, unsporting and displaying little skill. Its not how they played. Bodyline itself emerged mostly to stop it, with bowlers like Fred Root swtiching to leg theory if professionals dared to steal singles for nudging it into the onside. You take a cheap run, I put 7 man back on the leg side and bowl at your feet. So while it became an option to field that way to stop runs, it also became a way to stop batsman exploiting what was seen as a loophole while batting. It had a sporting and moral element to it. There is significant evidence to suggest Jardine's mindset was based on that.

Jardine also got barracked to shreds on both tours of Australia (28-29 and 32-33). Australian working class crowds mimicked similar loud, brash crowds of English football, and this was something that Jardine playing in the sanctity of English county cricket's upper class tendencies, would never have come close to experiencing. Aussie hated his Harlequin cap and upper class, snotty air - Jardine thought the Aussie crowds swearing, sledging and jeering were sub-human scum, and made no effort on his first tour in Australia to make friends - in fact, by the second tour, he would purposefully wind up crowds and the Aussie press by being silent in interviews, not releasing team lists before games so people didnt know if stars were playing, etc.

Either way, to Jardine not only did he find the environment of playing in Australia unbecoming of the sport (or of humans), the way Australian's played was seen as lousy also. Feeling like someone might having been told to come outside after a disagreement at the local, he turned up with a pool cue, some brassed knuckles, and got stuck in. He justifies bodyline on that type of mindset, to him he was simply reducing himself down to Australia's level, but with better weapons and tactics. In a way, I think he is right. For any English amateur, the tactics of the day would have felt equally unfair and against the spirit of the game. They were simply playing by the rule book set by Australia.

I dont really care personally. The rules are the rules, and I have not seen anything claim Australia or England broke them during this period. But it does give you a picture of how the completely alien differences in culture effect how they perform....

The only time England set aside all that class based nonsense and went out and played the "professional way", they beat the undefeatable Bradman, and reduced him to a mere mortal. Its almost certain if England continued to pay no attention to the useless elements of the game they brought themselves down with, they would have done that more regularly.

[sussexpob]

And doesn't the frighteningly exalted standards of the Yorkshire league in the mid-century make my point about a high base because of mass participation. Sounds like India now.

Unless I misunderstood something, I wouldn't deny that at all. I stated above that the quality of the Yorkshire leagues in this period is supposed to be tremendously high, and that there is even questions about whether those professionals getting the step up, many of the batsman of which still stand out as all-time statistical best evers for England, might not even have been the best players in their club sides. I would safely assume without having to go into further detail, that this talent pool is a direct result of both a meritocracy in picking talent, and the fact that Yorkshire leagues were competitive affairs with winners, losers and relegations. This is modern sport, played in a modern environment... That didn't change the fact Yorkshire were still mostly composed of terrible amateurs, and that the vast majority of quality got nowhere near the county, nor England side. In that way, this just makes the system feel worse...

I guess in that way it is similar to India of the past. India has a cricket mad popoulation equal to multiples of the rest of the world, and yet have never been a good enough test team to compete away from home for any sustained period, and only in recent years have been brilliant at home. I don't think you have to look far into the reasons, when in the 1990s and 2000s I know that they were basically an elite caste hindu team with the odd Muslim (Zaheer) or Sikh (Harbi) getting a game. I guess when you just happen to be looking for richer, higher caste players, you are ignoring literally 100s of millions of potential players. So the net effect is, it doesn't matter.

Indians get really annoyed when you mention Vinod Kambli, but I find it funny that people would even attempt to defend India's position on him. The only guy from a lower caste who got picked, wracked up school records where he was compared to Tenduklar (who played with him) as a similar child prodigy.... was dropped with the highest test average ever recorded by an Indian, and never repicked despite him being only 22 at the time, and the fact he averaged 60 for the rest of his career in FC cricket. India picked some real stinkers like Ajit Jadeja 20 times over him (and who got repicked several times, unlike Kambli). And if failure or bad form is the reason, why was VVS Laxman picked averaging 30 less than Kambli after a similar amount of matches?

Read into that what you will, but I think its fairly obvious if his dad was the first prince of Indore, he'd still be playing for India now at 52

In that way, yes, they are comparable. The strength of the domestic game never transfers across, because the reality is the test team is picked on the basis of 0.01% of available talent. Its not a meritocracy.

[sussexpob]

My guess is that the idea of a cricket golden age was the nostalgia of depression and wartime writers wistfully remembering a whole social era which was thought of as a golden age. The Edwardian era before the great depression, and the promise of young people who died in trenches

I think its more specifically bias, although it might contribute. The most influential post WWI publication was the Cricketer, which was setup and edited by Plum Warner; a test player from the pre-war era, then leader of the ECB and MCC tour manager after it. It's hardly like he is going to tell you that cricket in the era was crap, when he was administrating it or captaining England's most successful Ashes era. Frequently, touring amateur players doubled up as correspondants. But nothing really penetrates the upper class sensibility of what is published.

In fact, you can name any working class cricketer between 1900 and 1945, and I will refer you to at least one source which discusses them as a problematic character.

You can name any upper class cricketer in the same era who has a bad FC or test record, and is picked solely on their upbringing, and it will be the opposite. Its amazing how many amateur players who had bat averages of 8 turned out to be the greatest, most inspiring captains of the time.... I cant remember the guys name, but remember reading a hilarious cricinfo bio of one which was massively long despite him never doing anything worthy of mention in cricket... best captain ever, inspiration... never scored aa 50 in 4 seasons, team never won a game. Defo sounds like a great leader.

[sussexpob]

Here is one that is memorable.....

Scored 6 x 50s in over 500 first class games.

First line of the bio mentions what a great character he is.....

https://www.espncricinfo.com/cricketers ... orth-11946

Duckworth used an "Owzat" shout of such piercing quality and volume that his appeal alone would have made him a figure to be remembered.

Translation... he was s***