An Australian cricket statistician claimed today to have found four "missing" runs which would lift Don Bradman's test average to 100.
Bradman, regarded as the greatest cricketer of all time, needed four runs in his last test innings against England at the Oval in 1948 to end his famous career a test average of 100 runs per innings.
It has passed into cricket folklore that Bradman was bowled for a duck by little-known Englishman Eric Hollies, finishing a 52-test career in which he scored 28,067 runs with an average of 99.94.
Statistician Charles Davis now claims to have studied old test match scorebooks and to have found a "tantalising clue" that Bradman may have scored four more runs than he has been awarded.
Writing in Fairfax newspapers Saturday, Davis said his research had found that errors and anomalies arose quite regularly in old test match scorebooks.
Davis reviewed the scorebook of the eight-day fifth test of the 1928-29 series against England in Melbourne, when Bradman was batting with Jack Ryder.
"There are four runs attributed to Ryder that are in the wrong place in both the batting section of the score and in the bowling section," Davis said.
"There is no doubt that a recording error of some kind has occurred. So where do these runs belong?" Davis said either Ryder may have scored the runs at some other point of the innings, they were not scored at all or "just perhaps" they were scored by Bradman.
"It is all about the scoring, an activity usually taken for granted," he said.
Davis, a former scientist, said more potential errors could be found in other scorebooks that could lower Bradman's test average.
