Cricketers Jack Fingleton and Don Bradman had a rivalry almost as fierce as Bodyline
STRIDING out to bat Jack Fingleton looked bulkier than usual, because he had padded himself under his shirt to take on Bodyline tactics
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STRIDING out to bat, Jack Fingleton looked bulkier than usual.
The 24-year-old knew the First Test of the 1932-33 Ashes series would be brutal.
English captain Douglas Jardine had stacked the leg-side with fielders, urging his bowlers to pelt the Aussie batsmen above the waist, in a tactic that became known as Bodyline.
Fingleton, however, was prepared. He had padded his body ahead of the onslaught.
He stared down ball and after ball, taking hits to his body, rather than deflecting to left fielders.
Ironically, Bodyline was employed by the English team to take down a player who wasn’t even in the first Test line up — Donald Bradman.
But Fingleton was more defensive than Bradman. He dug his heels in and walked off the Sydney Cricket Ground black and blue, racking up 26 runs off 77 painful balls. Later he said: “I had a depressed, ‘safety first’ mentality”.
Fingleton would be remembered after that first appearance for standing up to England’s oppressive strategy by showing an indomitable will.
By the second innings, he had loosened up and finished as top scorer, with 40 runs.
Partners came and went, but Fingleton, sporting eight new bruises, held out for almost two and half hours,” biographer Greg Growden wrote. “Australia had found an opening batsman who would stand up to England’s intimidation.”
John “Jack” Henry Fingleton was born in Waverley, Sydney, 110 years ago today, one of six children in a staunch Irish Catholic family.
Fingleton was 12 when his father died and, as a result, he was forced out of school and into work.
By 15 he was a copy boy for Sydney’s Daily Guardian newspaper. He joined the Waverley cricket club and, in 1929, made his debut for NSW joining Bradman in the team and their notorious rivalry was born.
Bradman was a Freemason while Fingleton was Catholic — but it was the stark contrast in their characters which drove the friction.
By the time Fingleton was elevated to the Australian cricket team, Bradman was a national hero and the target of the English during the ’32-’33 Ashes tour. But, although the media at the time whipped up a frenzy about religious differences, Bradman said he “didn’t care two hoots whether a man was a Catholic or a Mason or a Church of England or what he was”.
He knew, however, that some of the Catholics didn’t want him as captain. There was one game in which Bradman allegedly mocked Fingleton when he found out the Catholic had sprinkled his bat with holy water. ‘We’ll see what a dry bat will do out there,” Bradman said as he took his place on the pitch after a quick dismissal.
During the Ashes ’32-’33 series the pair’s rivalry intensified, when an Australian cricketer leaked a private conversation to journalist Claude Corbett.
Aussie opening batsman Bill Woodfull had been subjected to 90 minutes of Bodyline tactics before he was felled during the Third Test at the Adelaide oval.
But when English manager Plum Warner came to see Woodfull afterwards, the Australian famously said: “I do not want to see you, Mr Warner. There are two teams out there. One is playing cricket and the other is not.”
The next day, the conversation was splashed in every newspaper and relations between the two countries disintegrated.
On January 18, 1933, the Australian Board of Control sent a cable to the Marylebone Cricket Club which read: “Bodyline bowling assumed such proportions as to menace best interests of game, making protection of body by batsmen the main consideration. In our opinion it is unsportsmanlike. Unless stopped at once likely to upset friendly relations between Australia and England.”
Both Bradman and Fingleton were convinced the other had told the press.
In his book 1978, The Immortal Victor Trumper, Fingleton tried to set the record straight.
He said Corbett told him the following story: “I got a ring on the phone that night at our hotel.
“It was from Don Bradman, who told me he wanted to tell me something ... while we sat in his car, he told me all about the Warner- Woodfull incident.”
Fingleton later wrote: “Bradman would have saved me a lot of backlash in the game had he admitted that he had given the leak.”
Fellow Test cricketer, Bill O’Reilly, a long-time friend of Fingleton and member of the Catholic faction, defended the late cricketer: “From my first-hand experience of Fingleton, formed over 50 years of sport, business and social friendship, never did I get the slightest impression that (Fingleton) was a liar. He was not.”
Fingleton played his last Test in 1938 and went on to a career as a political reporter. He died in 1981.
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