The Redacted Sherlock Holmes, Volume 3

by Orlando Pearson

  “Well, you have fixed one problem, Mr Holmes,” said Jardine with an air of grim determination as shortly before the close Wyatt clubbed another delivery from the Australian spinner dismissively to the boundary. “That’s knocked the stuffing right out of Grimmett.” A few minutes passed before he spoke again. “But the second member of the duumvirate I need you to stop is the man down there.”

  He pointed to a slim blond figure fielding on the boundary close to the pavilion. As we watched, Donald Bradman sprinted round to intercept another booming drive from Wyatt off Grimmett just short of the rope and turned an apparently obvious four into just a single.

  “Tomorrow is a rest day,” continued Jardine, “but on Monday it is likely that Bradman will bat and I would be grateful for your insights on him. We have found this man almost impossible to dislodge all summer and I hope your comments on him are as insightful as your ones on Grimmett.”

  No more wickets fell in the evening session and England closed at three hundred and sixteen. We agreed to meet on the Monday when it was likely that Bradman would bat to see what further wisdom Holmes could impart.

  I had expected Holmes to come back to my house in Queen Square after we left the ground, but he expressed a preference for his cottage on the South Downs and we parted at Vauxhall Station. I was preparing to go back to the ground on Monday morning when a telegram arrived from Holmes. “BUSY WITH ARCHIVES. WILL COME TOMORROW.”

  I had no idea why archives might be such an impediment to Holmes coming to the second day, but I let Jardine know by telegram that we could not join him at the Oval until the Tuesday. In our absence, England closed on four hundred and five with Grimmett taking two tail-end wickets and, after a fine opening stand, Australia finished the second day on two hundred and fifteen for two with Bradman twenty-seven not out.

  On the Tuesday morning, Holmes and I met at the Oval. Jardine sent a message saying he had a business appointment, but promising to join us after lunch. Through his father, who was on the club committee, we again had seats at the top of the pavilion. I sat in wonder as Holmes demonstrated that his time in his archives had not been spent without purpose, although the beginning of the exposition of his findings sounded unpromising in the extreme:

  “You will remember Isonomy who was in the direct bloodline that produced Silver Blaze,” Holmes began. “Isonomy only ran fourteen times, but won ten of the races he ran - an extraordinary win rate well beyond almost any horse. His owner, Fredrick Gretton, withheld him from major races so that when the stallion ran in the Cambridgeshire Handicap at Newmarket, the odds against him were 40–1 and his win thereby delivered Gretton a massive financial coup. This sort of thing is possible in a sport where there are owners who can control when their horses run and so a newcomer can blaze onto the scene and defy the normal law of statistical performance.”

  “And how does this bear on Don Bradman?” I asked, confused as to how the performance of a horse could be of relevance to the performance of a cricketer like Bradman.

  “Bradman’s performances,” Holmes explained, “also defy the normal laws of statistics. But cricket, by contrast with horse-racing, is a game where there is little scope for performances outside the normal laws of statistics once a meaningful sample is used. It is widely played, there is no motivation to hide a player’s performance, no one to hide it for him, and its scoring methodology, more than that of any other sport, delivers a huge fund of statistics by which you can reasonably compare the achievements of different players. Accordingly, I would expect its performers to conform to a normal range of performance and scatter.”

  He paused to reach into a folder and drew out a piece of foolscap which was covered with figures in his small, neat writing.

  “Instead,” he continued, “I find that Bradman’s statistics put him off the statistical scale. In the last Australian domestic season, the average score by all batsmen who played was twenty-seven with a standard deviation of ten. You would therefore expect the most extreme performances to fall within three standard deviations of this.” Holmes picked up his score-card and drew a small chart with a Gaussian curve of deviation from the mean to illustrate his point. “McCabe, the second-best batsman in Australia, is almost exactly three deviations from the mean. He averaged fifty-six - just under three standard deviations from the mean of all Australian batsmen last year.” Holmes put a little cross on the extreme right-hand edge of the bell curve to illustrate his point. “Bradman, by contrast, averaged one hundred and thirteen, which places him eight and a half deviations from the mean. So, if I take twenty-seven and ten as being representative mean and standard deviation for cricket at large, his average of ninety-three in his Test matches to date is over six and a half standard deviations from the mean.” Holmes marked another cross on his score-card, this time well outside the bell-shape of his Gaussian curve.

  I looked out at the slight Bradman as he stood at the crease. He had already advanced his score to over a century by lunchtime. I was surprised to note that Holmes was equally engrossed.

  “I remain the world’s only consulting detective,” he commented, seemingly unable to take his eyes off the spectacle below us, “and even after fifty years I am still a nonpareil in my field. Bradman would appear to be my equivalent at batting, like Shakespeare on the stage, or Bach in the concert-hall.”

  Rain set in at lunch and there was little play for the rest of the day. Jardine sent us a message that he would join us the next day. On the Wednesday the three of us sat in our familiar seats in the pavilion and watched as Bradman advanced from his overnight score of one hundred and thirty. Many of the same people, including the party of important personages who had been present on Saturday, had returned on the Wednesday, presumably in the hope of seeing Bradman play a long innings. When he was on one hundred and seventy, he was struck over the heart by Larwood who was bowling at full pace and the Australian collapsed briefly to his knees.

  Flushed with excitement, Jardine stood up from his seat and exulted. “But the blighter’s yellow! He’s yellow through and through!”

  I could see a look of shock spread across the faces of the people around us at Jardine’s vulgar outburst, but Bradman himself rapidly recovered his poise from the blow he had been struck. He batted serenely on before falling for two hundred and thirty-two, which left his average for his seven innings in the series at one hundred and thirty-nine, or - as Holmes put it much to Jardine’s puzzlement - just over eleven standard deviations from the mean.

  Australia closed two hundred and ninety ahead. In the interval between innings, the discussions between Holmes and Jardine, to which I was an observer, focused on how Bradman might be stopped.

  “You have now seen Bradman play an innings, Mr Holmes. Have your sharp eyes spotted something that has to date escaped the attention of England’s bowlers and their captain?”

  Holmes hauled out his figure-covered sheet of foolscap. He first of all repeated for Jardine’s benefit what he had told me about how extreme Bradman’s performances were from a statistical point of view. I suspect that had Holmes not made his brilliant observations about Grimmett on the previous Saturday, Jardine would have made his excuses and left, but I could see he was hanging onto my friend’s every word. Holmes continued:

  “Bradman has yet to play enough at an international level for it to be statistically significant, even though it is worth pointing out that he now averages nearly one hundred and three after the first innings of his ninth Test, which is quite unprecedented. Instead of watching here, I have spent two days in my archives checking facts from newspapers and sending regular telegrams to Mr Wilder who, as Dr Watson will remember, fled to Australia under something of a cloud, and who accordingly was most anxious to help me in any way he could. For my statistical population, I looked at Bradman’s innings in Australia, of which he has played fifty. These are the most relevant games as it is in Australia that you will be playi
ng in three winters’ time. In these fifty innings, his average is over ninety, which is also unparalleled.”

  “I had expected suggestions from you, Mr Holmes,” said Jardine, looking at Holmes with the awed reverence I had only previously seen on the face of Stanley Hopkins, “on what bowlers to use and what fields to set. But there are very few easy one-per-cent gains left to make in cricket these days and statistical analysis is something we have not looked at before. Accordingly, I am most eager to hear your results.”

  “In his fifty innings, Bradman is a notably good completer of innings and a notably poor starter. In his top quartile of innings, he averages two hundred and ninety-eight and in the bottom quartile, he averages less than four. Nearly a third of his innings end before he has exceeded twenty.”

  Jardine drew contemplatively on his pipe before he asked “And how does that compare to other major batsmen?”

  “I have compared Bradman against the Test match performances to date of Sutcliffe and Hobbs. For Sutcliffe, his bottom quartile of innings averages thirteen and his top quartile one hundred and thirty-eight. Four fifths of his innings exceed twenty. For Hobbs, the equivalent figures are nine and one hundred and thirty while over seven tenths of his innings exceed twenty. This means that compared to Hobbs and Sutcliffe, you have a good chance of getting Bradman early, but if he gets through the early skirmishes, his concentration is almost unshakeable.”

  “So what should my strategy be against him?”

  “If his concentration is weaker at the beginning of his innings, it is perhaps best to try and disrupt it. Some sort of distraction tactic may be called for.”

  I could see Jardine looking a little sceptical at Holmes’s suggestions, but the statistical confirmation of Bradman’s superiority over all other batsmen gave the Surrey amateur little choice but to listen.

  “And what sort of bowlers get him out cheaply?” he asked at length.

  “In his bottom quartile of innings, there was one run out but, other than that, it is noticeable that he is as susceptible to fast bowling as he is to spin bowling in the initial phases of his innings. Among spin bowlers he is as vulnerable to wrist spinners as to finger spinners, irrespective of the direction in which they turn the ball - Grimmett, Blackie and White have all had successes against him. It is thus his concentration early in his innings that is suspect, not his technique against any bowling.”

  “But I have a theory that he is weak against fast bowling.”

  “I was going to raise this with you myself. I have not seen enough propellers of the ball-”

  “Bowlers,” I interrupted.

  “-to carry out statistical checks of the type that I was able to perform on Bradman to assess the extent to which Larwood outpaces other bowlers. On my viewing in this game, however, he is notably faster than Australia’s Wall, Fairfax and McCabe, and none of the English bowlers are close to being a match for him in terms of speed either. It was a remarkable feat for Larwood to have struck Bradman with the ball when the Australian had already reached one hundred and seventy, for my research has suggested that Bradman is virtually impossible to discommode when he has accumulated a score of that size. The precise matter I wanted to raise with you concerns the curious incident of the game between Nottinghamshire and the Australians at the beginning of July.”

  Holmes pulled a newspaper cutting out of his pocket and Jardine seized it eagerly to see what Holmes was referring to. After a few seconds of study of the cutting, he looked up at Holmes in puzzlement.

  “But Bradman did not play for the Australians against Nottinghamshire in July. His name is not listed on this score-card.”

  “That was the curious incident,” said Holmes mildly. “I would posit that Bradman was absent because in Larwood, Voce and Barratt, Nottinghamshire had the fastest attack in the country and that Bradman prevailed upon his captain not to choose him. As it was, Larwood and Voce got seven wickets between them in the Australians’ first innings. The Australians had to bat out for a draw in the second and were helped by Nottinghamshire barely bowling Larwood.”

  “So it is not just Bradman who is yellow!” exclaimed Jardine so loudly as to attract the interest of our fellow spectators once again - but rather than calling Bradman by name, he used a term to describe him which I could not possibly repeat even in a story not intended for general publication until some point in the distant future. “The whole lot of them are cowards! ... Well,” he continued, “I’ll make sure we make the most of that. We’ll take a battery of fast bowlers out to Australia and pepper them with bowling on the line of the body. If their batsmen get hit, we’ll call it regrettable collateral damage.”

  “I noted in my scrutiny of the archives,” continued Holmes, after a brief pause following Jardine’s outburst, “that Voce has not yet represented England.”

  “That will be remedied,” replied Jardine, once he had calmed down. “There is a tour of the West Indies this winter and I will make representations to ensure that Voce goes on it. He needs to get experience of international cricket in hot conditions and this is his chance. As well as Larwood and Voce, we’ll take Bowes and Allen to Australia. We saw Bradman struck on the body today. He and his teammates can look forward to plenty more of that. And that won’t be the end of it. When we bowl the ball down the leg side, we’ll pack the field, so that the blighters have no choice other than to hit the ball to the fieldsman or be hit. I greatly appreciate your suggestions, Mr Holmes. If anything else occurs to you, please be sure to let me know.”

  Holmes then asked in his mildest voice the question that was coursing through my head. “Do you not think your new line of attack on Bradman might generate some controversy in cricketing circles? I understand it is normal in cricket to attack the wicket rather than the body?”

  “Laws were made for man, not man for laws,” said Jardine in a voice which invited no argument. “What is anticipated does not breach the laws of our great game and, if we want to beat a team with a player who breaks the normal laws of statistical achievement, we have little choice.”

  England reduced the deficit by twenty-four before the end of the day’s play.

  Holmes and I walked to the station. On the way I raised the issue with him of the tactics that Jardine was going to pursue.

  “Are they consistent with sportsmanship and good relations with the Australians?” I asked.

  Holmes paused before replying:

  “As Mr Jardine said, such tactics are within the laws of the game as at present constituted. I am, however, inclined to fear, especially if Mr Jardine is incautious enough to express some of the views in Australia that he has expressed to us and, in particular, if he chooses to employ some of the turns of phrase we have heard him use this afternoon, that, while he may win us the series, he may also lose us a dominion.”

  We parted at Vauxhall and Holmes showed no interest in returning the following day as Australia recovered the Ashes by bowling England out for two hundred and fifty-one. It was noticeable that Grimmett was largely ineffective when, on a pitch which had already been played on for four days, he might reasonably have expected some help. Hornibrook, by contrast, having taken a mere six wickets in the previous four games in the series, took seven here with his left-arm slow bowling.

  I followed the cricketing scene over the next two and a half years running up to England’s tour to Australia with the keenest interest and many events foreshadowed in what I have described so far duly came to pass. Voce had a successful tour of the Caribbean in 1930/31 while Jardine was appointed England captain in 1931. I also noted that for all Bradman’s popular reputation, the Australian players were more inclined to attribute their success in 1930 to Grimmett than to Bradman. The Australian vice-captain, Richardson, was quoted as saying “We could have beaten anyone without Bradman. Without Grimmett we couldn’t have beaten the blind school.”

  The English touring p
arty for the 1932/33 tour of Australia, when it was announced, contained four out-and-out fast bowlers - Larwood, Voce, Bowes and Allen - as well as the brisk pace of Wyatt. This provoked considerable surprise among cricket followers not armed with the conclusions Jardine had drawn following his encounter with Sherlock Holmes.

  There was a long series of warm-up games between the tourists and various representative sides before the first Test match. Bradman had only indifferent success in the three of these games in which he played and in the third of them, he batted down the order. The newspaper reports I read described him as being ill, but the popular press gleefully pointed out that he had been able to play golf on the rest day. A stress-related complaint then caused him to miss the first Test match, which England won quite easily. I half-expected Bradman to stand down for the rest of the series, but he then returned for the second Test at Melbourne. I was fascinated to read the account of the first day’s play in the Daily Chronicle, of which the following is an extract:

  O’Brien was run out when the Australian tally had reached sixty-seven. There was a roar from the crowd as Bradman came down the steps of the pavilion and made his way to the wicket. As he marked his guard, the roar continued. Bowes stood at his mark and made to start his run-up but the prolonged ovation made him pull out of it. Jardine gestured to the crowd, perhaps bidding them to be still, but this only made the hubbub louder. Only after another whole minute had passed was Bowes finally able to move in. The Yorkshire paceman dropped the ball short and Bradman, perhaps distracted by the delay, went to hook. The ball cannoned off the bottom edge of the bat and onto the leg stump and Bradman was on his way, first ball. Jardine performed what looked like a somewhat undignified war dance at mid-on at his departure.

  Although England eventually lost this game with Bradman scoring a not-out century in the second innings to maintain his Test-match batting average at over a hundred, I was not surprised at the efficacy of the tactics my friend had promulgated to Jardine.