The Don would not have approved
ESPNcricinfo staff
25-Feb-2013
Getty Images
Mark Smit, in the Business Day, says the recent quest by a group of statisticians to find four more Test runs for Donald Bradman - in order to push his career average to 100 - would have been ridiculed by the Don himself.
Why did they find four runs and not a different number? Surely, in their rudimentary Australian way, they would have felt that finding more runs would make it all look just a little more kosher.
...
He was unquestionably a believer in the old cricket philosophy of “You win some, you lose some”. He would have understood, and accepted, that some scorecards got it wrong on the minus side and others got it wrong on the plus side.
He was asked a couple of times before his death what he felt about the intrusion of technology into a game that has built years of folklore on its fundamental characteristic — human error.
From the responses he gave, I felt he had profound misgivings about the technological advance, and the clinical, inflexible dimension it adds to cricket.
Mathew Varghese is sub-editor (stats) at Cricinfo