Mr Invincible

Bill Brown, the oldest Australia Test cricketer, died today aged 95. Below is a string Patrick Kidd posted a month ago about Brown and a bygone age...

If you have a spare 15 minutes, I strongly recommend reading Peter English's interview with Bill Brown, one of the five surviving members of Australia's 1948 "Invincibles" and, at the age of 95, almost the oldest surviving Test cricketer.

There is something about that dwindling generation that captivates me and a fair part of that is wistful remembrance of my own grandfather, who died two years ago this month at the age of 90. The struggles and sacrifices that they had to make, the poverty, the war and the decency, the optimism despite there being so many reasons to be glum. It reminds me how fortunate - and how unappreciative - we can be today.

Brown ended his Test career with a batting average higher than Justin Langer and Michael Clarke. I wonder what Brown, who ran a sports shop in Brisbane after retiring in 1948, makes of the sums that were paid last week for the latest generation of cricketers. Or what he thinks of Twenty20, given that he belonged to the day when opening batsmen's main job was to bat beyond lunch on the first day. "The pace we scored at didn't matter a darn," he tells English, adding a comment of his wife that "you could always tell when I was batting by the number of people leaving the ground".

Sounds dull? Consider this: in 1938, Brown played in the world's first televised Test match and carried his bat for an unbeaten 206. If they had been bidding for cricketers then, he would have been one of the most in demand.

Comments

[John]

It certainly was a different era.
I am reminded of Keith Millers quaint comment when asked about how he handled the pressure of test cricket. "There's no pressure in test cricket. Having a messerschmitt up your arse, that's pressure son"