The Ashes Legends: The super villain of Test cricket - Douglas Jardine

The idea was conceived at Fender’s house, tried out at the nets in Surrey, explained in the train to Melbourne and finally perfected at the first warm up game. Jardine didn’t take the field but instructed Bob Wyatt, the stand-in captain, to let the three fast men bowl short at the batsman’s body to a packed leg-side field. It surprised the Aussies but they didn’t know what awaited them.

The following five Tests saw Voce, Bowes and Larwood relentlessly throw down a barrage of short pitch deliveries at the batsmen with seven fielders on the leg side with terrifying results– broken ribs, fractured skulls and unprecedented on and off field hostility.

The battered and bruised Aussie cricketers protested, but the board didn’t listen. Pelham Warner, the manager of the MCC team, warned Jardine of the consequences, but Jardine didn’t budge and events took a nasty turn at Adelaide. Bill Woodfull received a snorter from Larwood in his ribs that saw the Aussie captain go down wincing in pain. The non-striker, Bradman, and the entire English team ran towards him, but Jardine stood his ground applauding, “Well bowled Harold!”

Much to the bewilderment of the batsmen, he switched the fielders towards the leg side and signaled Larwood to bowl at Woodfull’s body. The Adelaide crowd watched in amazement, brimming with anger, but Bert Oldfield’s injury sent them into complete frenzy and the name of Douglas Jardine became synonymous to “unsporting” behavior.

England regained the Ashes but every action has its consequences. The MCC banned the “leg-theory” and treated Jardine as an outcast. The world resented his actions. Australian fans burned the Union Jack flag during the Sydney Test to express their anger at his tactics. And Jardine etched his name as the “Inglorious B*st**d” of Test cricket.

But was he wrong in what he did? Or was he reprimanded for being clinically efficient?

There was nothing illegal about Bodyline. Jardine found a weakness and built a strategy around it. He had immense respect for Bradman but decided to fight him with fire rather than platitude. He just proved that no athlete is perfect and no matter how powerful your enemy is, there’s always a way to weaken him. His strategy worked and perhaps that led to his downfall.

Douglas Jardine is regarded as the biggest villain in cricket history because society tends to vilify what they don’t understand. Jardine’s outstanding batting ability was forgotten and he was maligned for life. Jardine was a complex man motivated by a cause. He believed that he infantry wages the war, but it’s the generals who win them. He was appointed for a job and he delivered.

The cricket world didn’t understand him and robbed him off his achievement. He was a great captain, but his tactical genius became his biggest enemy. The world detested him because he won in an era where the “bad guy” wasn’t supposed to win.

Cricket history might remember him as the one who stooped to conquer, but Douglas Jardine was the first captain who proved that a strategy can even fend off the best. England needed a super villain to stop Bradman’s super-heroic efforts and Jardine enacted it to the tee. He may have been wrong, but he and his men scripted a story that would live on as long as cricket will be played, because, as Alfred Hitchcock once said:

“The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture…”

A dramatization of the 1932/33 Test cricket series between England and Australia..?