Bodyline Autopsy

"I’m interested in leadership and it most obviously counts in politics, but it’s also very important in sport. And the reason I chose Bodyline Autopsy , is because this is the nearest you’ll get to cricket history. A bit like Team of Rivals , Frith has talked to everybody, read everything, looked at everything from every possible angle and has then written what is probably a very fair and balanced account of the most extraordinary Ashes series ever. The main characters were Douglas Jardine, the English captain, who really didn’t like Australians, which was partly to do with personality and class – they were the young upstarts and we were the Mother of the Commonwealth and all that. There’s Don Bradman, the greatest batsman of all time. And Jardine worked out that to win they basically had to concentrate on him, and came up with Bodyline or what he called fast-leg theory bowling, in large part to deal with Bradman. The other character is Harold Larwood, working class, from a mining background, quite self-effacing in his own way but also a leader. He was a shy, quite modest man. The Duncan Hamilton biography has some amazing stories about how when he was playing for Nottinghamshire he was not quite easily lead, but he was not the strongest character, and yet he became a leader. It was fantastic but it was done totally from an Australian perspective. This is one of the great sporting stories of all time and an incredible controversy. Did those cricketers realise just how big this was going to be in sporting history? Probably not, because they were living for the moment – you’re a sportsman trying to win. What is great about it is these different characters. For me Harold Larwood is the real hero. I love Harold Larwood and he was a great bowler; he never really lost what he was about. Of course, at the end, because it virtually split the commonwealth apart and Anglo-Australian relations became so bad, the establishment wanted Larwood to take the rap so they pressed him to apologise. Larwood said ‘No, Jardine was the captain, he told me how to bowl and I bowled: I’m a professional cricketer.’ The whole class thing, which is partly what the Anglo-Australian background was about, was writ large within the England team and within the series as a whole. So it becomes a fascinating historical, social study as well. And Larwood refused to apologise; he never played for England again, and eventually he emigrated to Australia. And David Frith obviously loves cricket, and this is balanced, unlike the TV series. It was an Australian journalist who coined the term ‘bodyline’, which Jardine hated because they always denied they were bowling at the player to hurt them. They said they were bowling at the player to force them to play the ball in a certain way so that the ball would then drop to these six or seven guys clustered on the leg side. The other thing about leadership, history and all that, in a sense the England guys broke the mould. Back then in the 1930s they didn’t even wear protection. They didn’t have enough headgear – there was one guy there who fractured his skull. It is understanding that ultimately, at that level, sport is about winning. You had the whole gentleman versus players thing. But Jardine said, we’re here to win. In terms of strategy this is the great thing: he said focus on the strongest part of your opponent not on their weakest part. Bradman was the Australian team’s strongest part so they worked on him. So I think that sense of leadership in a team sport, even with all the impact and controversy about their strategy at the time, I think that can be justified. I think politics can learn a lot from sport and sport can learn a lot from politics. And I think business can learn a lot from both. Too often in politics people have a line on their opponents and they end up believing it and so they stop assessing their strengths. For example, when Mrs Thatcher was in power we [the Labour Party and its supporters] spent a lot of time saying, ‘Well, she doesn’t care’ or ‘She’s very right wing’. You are constantly finding the things that you think are a weak point but what you should be doing is saying, ‘Well hold on a minute, where is she strong?’ In order to understand it and work it out. Labour was too slow to recognise that because we saw her as we saw her, we failed to see that there was another way of looking at her and that was how a lot of people, our people started to look at her: strong, making change. Yes, big vision, different. The lesson is never ever underestimate your opponent. I think in politics people do that quite a lot."