Tuesday, December 11, 2001 When Mike Selvey ran a competition in the Guardian a few weeks back he posed a particularly resonant tiebreaker: why does Douglas Jardine deserve a posthumous knighthood? Both the question and the winning answer ("because he stuffed the Aussies in their own backyard") highlight a rarely acknowledged phenomenon - that Australian and English attitudes towards the events of 1932-33 are more polarised today than ever. It is, by now, little more than an historical curiosity. But it is one of the curiouser ones imaginable.

It is mildly ironic that Australia spent the past week debating whether to play one legspinner or two at Adelaide. On the same ground 69 years ago leg theory, not legspin, was the hot topic from the moment Harold Larwood struck Bill Woodfull on the chest. Woodfull, for those who don't know the story, staggered away, clutching both hands to his heart, and collapsed. Captain Jardine's response was to loudly proclaim "Well bowled, Harold", and to swing his cluster of close-in, leg-side fieldsmen into place. Woodfull's bat was promptly knocked out of his hands by Larwood and he was hit again and again, before finally being bowled for 22.

Here, surely, was a clear-cut case of bad guy versus good guy. Apparently not. When the average Australian cricket fan sets foot in England the first thing to baffle him is the cover charge for county matches: £9, or $23.94, for a mediocre, rain-affected day's play. The second surprise often comes seconds later while remonstrating about said entry fee with the gateman, who concludes the argument by protesting: "You Aussies haven't stopped whingeing since Bodyline."

To too many English fans, Jardine was a brilliant intellectual, a tactical genius; anyone who suggests otherwise is a prissy, whimpering apologist for Don Bradman's shortcomings against short-pitched bowling. To nearly all Australians, this is an insidious rewriting of history. No historical figure is more reviled than Jardine: not Sir Otto Niemeyer, the Bank of England honcho whose refusal to relax Australia's interest repayments thrust the country into depression in the 1930s; not Larry Mize, the geeky American golfer whose 140-foot chip shot pinched the 1987 US Masters from Greg Norman; not even Tom Cruise, who dared make Our Nicole weep.

No homegrown work of social history, what's more, is complete without a detailed autopsy of what happened on that hot-tempered afternoon in mild-mannered Adelaide. Two marvellously insightful books of last year, Phillip Knightley's Australia: A Biography of a Nation and Michael Davie's Anglo-Australian Attitudes, each contain an entire chapter on Bodyline. Knightley contends that Jardine's actions "did more to hasten the rupture between Britain and Australia than any other single event", while Davie concludes: "At that moment Australia finally lost respect for the English gentleman. The ill-feeling and mistrust engendered by Bodyline … rumbles on even today."

This is viewed by Englishmen, of course, as so much prissiness. It has ever been thus, from the moment the English press dismissed Australia's complaints as "undignified snivelling" and seized on the innocuous phrase "leg theory" to describe a style of bowling which Woodfull's men privately called "scone theory".

Yet it is possible even now to detect a shift, a hardening, in English attitudes in favour of Douglas The Devious. Scyld Berry, the respected cricket correspondent of The Sunday Telegraph, commented ahead of last summer's Ashes series that Nasser Hussain could do with the pluck of his predecessors Jackson, Illingworth, Brearley and Jardine. The Independent sportswriter Brian Viner, writing on last year's centenary of Jardine's birth, gushed: "It is hard not to admire a man who courted hatred so zealously … To come close to fracturing an empire with nothing more than a cricket ball is quite an achievement." The deification of Jardine has begun - and the hypocrisy is a little sickening.

It was, after all, the English who objected most strongly to the West Indies pace attacks of the 1980s. John Woodcock, editor of the Wisden Almanack, crusaded against the "chilling dimension" Clive Lloyd had introduced to cricket, claiming "the viciousness of much of today's fast bowling is changing the very nature of the game". Yet, fearsome intimidators though they were, the Windies were pussycats next to Jardine's piranhas. There was no leg trap and the batsmen were encased in protective padding. Contrast that with the 1932-33 Australians, who batted in gardening gloves and without helmets. Had Australia's keeper Bert Oldfield been struck in the head by Malcolm Marshall in 1985 he might have suffered a migraine. As it was, struck by Larwood fifty years earlier, he almost died.

Expect these emotions to be played out all over again during next year's 70th anniversary of the Bodyline series, which happily - for the money men who will be churning out Bodyline T-shirts and souvenir stubby coolers - coincides with an Ashes summer. England and Australia pretty much go their own way as nations these days: the British affectionately curse the loutish, tanned Australians working behind the bars of London's pubs; Australians affectionately curse the laddish, pink-skinned Poms shacked up in backpacker hostels around Bondi.

Bodyline is the proof that Jagmohan Dalmiya's talk of an Anglo-Australian alliance - two old chums against the riff-raff - is more myth than reality. Until, at least, the Poms come clean and admit that Jardine was a grotesque little cheat.

Chris Ryan is managing editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly and a former Darwin correspondent of the Melbourne Age.

More Chris Ryan
Crisis? What crisis?
In the wrong hands

© Wisden CricInfo Ltd