War of CricketBradman's Best
Bradman's Best: Sir Donald Bradman's Selection of the Best Team in Cricket History (2001) is Australian author Roland Perry's account of Don Bradman naming, in the last years of his life, the best XI cricketers he had ever seen play — an all-time world team drawn from seven decades in which Bradman watched, played against, captained or selected virtually every major Test side.
Bradman, Perry, and how the book came about
Roland Perry's association with Bradman dated back to the mid-1990s. As Perry has told it, he submitted a long list of candidate names and the two men discussed Bradman's thinking on his greatest-ever team over several years; because Bradman was wary of publicity, the finished selections were made public only in this book, published the year he died. Perry is a prolific Australian journalist, historian and film-maker whose other cricket books include biographies of Steve Waugh and Keith Miller and a life of Shane Warne; he was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in 2011 for services to literature and later held a writer-in-residence post at Monash University.
What the book actually contains
Bradman's unusual authority as a selector came from the sheer length of his vantage point: a Test batsman from 1928 to 1948, then a national selector and administrator for Australia into the 1970s, he had personally seen or played against nearly every candidate for an all-time XI that the 20th century produced. The book is structured accordingly — an opening account of Bradman's selection process, followed by a dedicated essay on each player he chose, drawing on Bradman's own memories of facing or watching them rather than on statistics alone. It is Bradman's judgement of technique, temperament and match-winning instinct, filtered through Perry as collaborator and writer, that gives the book its value; it is also, inescapably, one great player's opinion of others, not an independently adjudicated ranking.
The book it's often confused with
Perry followed Bradman's Best with a second, similarly titled book, Bradman's Best Ashes Teams (2002), in which Bradman picked separate all-time Australian and English XIs specifically for Ashes cricket rather than a single world team. Because the two titles differ by only two words, secondhand booksellers and library catalogues frequently list them together or mislabel one as the other; readers looking specifically for Bradman's world XI, rather than his Ashes-only selections, should check the subtitle before buying.
The two books were not isolated projects. Perry had already published Captain Australia: A History of the Celebrated Captains of Australian Test Cricket in 2000, drawing on the same access to Bradman and to the archives of Australian cricket administration, and he went on to write full biographies of Keith Miller and Shane Warne in the years that followed. Bradman's Best sits inside that wider body of work as its most direct collaboration with Bradman himself — the closest thing to Bradman's own voice, filtered through a co-writer, that exists on where he ranked the players of his own century against one another.
How it was received
Reviewers at the time treated the book chiefly as a curiosity of Bradman's own judgement rather than as a work of independent cricket history, and that remains the fairest way to read it today: it is valuable exactly to the extent a reader wants to know what Bradman himself thought, and less valuable as an objective ranking exercise, since no rival selector's opinion is weighed against his. Perry does not interrogate or push back on any of Bradman's choices in the text; the book instead presents them, with supporting recollection and anecdote, as settled fact.
| Bradman's Best | Bradman's Best Ashes Teams | |
|---|---|---|
| Published | 2001 | 2002 |
| Scope | A single all-time world XI | Separate all-time Australian and English Ashes XIs |
| Publisher | Random House Australia / Bantam Press | Random House Australia / Bantam Press |
What the book is not is a work of critical biography. Perry writes entirely in deference to his subject: Bradman's reasoning for each selection is presented and explained, but never seriously challenged or set against a rival view. For readers who want that longer, more scrutinised account of Bradman's own career and place in the game, this site's Don Bradman legends profile is the place to look; this book is best read as exactly what it claims to be — the game's greatest batsman naming his own dream team, in his own words, for the only time he ever did so publicly.