Kaustubh Dudhane’s Reviews > The Art of Batting: The Craft of Cricket’s Greatest Run Scorers – WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR NOMINEE 2025 > Status Update

Only in cricket could 39 beat 99.94 But Bradman was a calculator, and Trumper was all the colours of the rainbow. It is unfair to compare the two.

The entire thing was made to look more dramatic as Gavaskar had on a wide-brim floppy hat with padding inside instead of a helmet. With an early form of arm guard, wrist band on the other side and something tucked into his trousers that looked like a bandage from a First World War bunker, he looked like a character in a John Carpenter film.

Someone has painted a cover drive, or maybe that famed manual The M.C.C. Cricket Coaching Book has come to life.

The final touch to make it look like another era is the fact that the batter has a wide-brimmed hat and not a helmet.

This is the Indian Mithali Raj playing just one of her thousands of perfect and textbook cover drives.

According to a Sam Perry article in the Guardian about Lehmann’s coaching course when he was still in charge of Australian cricket, ‘The first point of his opening slide simply said “WTBC” (translation: “Watch the ball, cunt”), going to show that even the most elementary aspect of Australian batting now requires aggression.’ 😂

The idea was simple; pitch it on the stumps and jag it back into the pads. It meant that cricket became similar everywhere. But the MCC countered that with a change to the laws in 1957 that stopped fielding teams from having more than two players behind square on the legside (many people believe this law changed because of Bodyline).