Another look at the Bradman-Fingleton feud
Peter English
25-Feb-2013
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Philip Derriman writes in the Sydney Morning Herald about Jack Fingleton, the opening batsman and journalist, who is famous for his writing – and a lifelong rift with Don Bradman. The centenary of Fingleton’s birth will be celebrated at the SCG on Monday and a biography about him will be released later in the year.
The feud apparently began in the early 1930s and ended only when Fingleton died in 1981. Nobody has ever got to the bottom of why they disliked each other so much, although everyone has assumed religion had something to do with it. Bradman was a Mason and Fingleton a Catholic.
There was also the question of who leaked a dressing-room story to the press during the Bodyline series of 1932-33. Fingleton was blamed for it, but he always maintained Bradman was the culprit and should have owned up.
In the lead-up to Anzac Day Paige Taylor wrote in the Australian about the fast bowler Tibby Cotter, the only Australian Test player to die in World War I.
It is generally accepted that Cotter was shot on October 31, 1917, by a Turk after the famous charge at Beersheba by the 12th and 4th Australian Light Horse regiments. But in his book to be published in October, Andrew Sproul and co-author Max Bonnell advance a new theory: that the 32-year-old was fatally wounded when a Turk prisoner committed an act of perfidy. "I have felt driven, over time, to get the story right and to tell it," Sproul said.
Peter English is former Australasia editor of ESPNcricinfo