Don Bradman

Don Bradman finished his Test career with a batting average of 99.94 — the most famous number in sport, and one that has never been remotely approached before or since. The Australian batsman needed just four runs in his final Test innings, at The Oval in 1948, to retire with an average of exactly 100; instead he was bowled for a duck on the second ball he faced, deceived by a googly from England's Eric Hollies.

The boy from Bowral

Born in Cootamundra, New South Wales, on 27 August 1908 and raised in the country town of Bowral, Bradman is said to have taught himself timing and placement as a boy by hitting a golf ball against a curved brick water-tank stand with a cricket stump — a story that has passed into Australian folklore. He made his first-class debut at 19 and his Test debut against England in December 1928, and within two years had become Australia's biggest sporting name, scoring 974 runs in the 1930 Ashes series in England — still the most runs scored by any batsman in a single Test series. His 334 at Headingley on that tour, including 309 in a single day's play, remains among the great innings in Ashes history.

Bodyline and the Invincibles

Bradman's scoring was so overwhelming that England devised a tactic specifically to blunt it: Bodyline, a barrage of fast, short-pitched bowling aimed at the batsman's body behind a packed leg-side field, deployed against him in the 1932–33 Ashes. It worked well enough to help England regain the Ashes, but Bradman still averaged 56.57 in that series — a return most batsmen would consider a career best. After the Second World War interrupted his career for six years, Bradman came back at 37 to captain the 1948 Australian touring team to England, remembered ever since as "the Invincibles" for going through the entire tour — all 34 matches, including five Tests — unbeaten.

"Worth three batsmen to Australia"

Bradman's own favourite innings was not his highest score. At Lord's in 1930, in the second Test of that Ashes tour, he made 254 and rated it, decades later, as close to perfect as he ever batted, saying practically every ball went exactly where he intended. Former Australia captain Bill Woodfull once said Bradman was "worth three batsmen to Australia" — a judgement borne out by the numbers: even in the first Ashes series after the Second World War, in 1946-47, playing at 38 and troubled by fitness problems, he was still the leading batsman on either side, averaging 97.14 as Australia won 3-0.

52 Tests, 6,996 runs, 29 centuries

Across 52 Tests between 1928 and 1948, Bradman scored 6,996 runs at 99.94, with 29 centuries and 13 fifties — a century roughly every three innings, a rate no batsman before or since has matched over a comparable career. His first-class average of 95.14, across 234 matches, is scarcely less extraordinary. He was knighted in the 1949 New Year Honours, the only Australian cricketer ever to receive the honour, and went on to serve for decades as a Test selector and cricket administrator. On his 90th birthday in 1998 he hosted a meeting with Sachin Tendulkar and Shane Warne, the two players most often compared to him; asked what he thought he would have averaged against modern bowling, Bradman is said to have answered "maybe 70," then added, "that's not bad for a 90-year-old man." He died in Adelaide on 25 February 2001, aged 92.

Test career summary

Format	Matches	Runs	Average	100s	Highest score
Tests	52	6,996	99.94	29	334
First-class	234	28,067	95.14	117	452*

Bradman set out his own selections for the greatest team cricket ever produced, and his reasoning for them, in a later book — see Bradman's Best. His nearest rival for scoring centuries at that rate, Sachin Tendulkar, needed almost twice as many innings to reach 29 Test hundreds.