Sid Barnes Felled at Short Leg — Old Trafford, July 1948

Barnes, a successful businessman as well as a Test cricketer, had built his reputation on courage at the crease and at short leg. He had been hit there before but never as severely.

On 9 July England were 5 down for around 130 in their first innings. Bradman placed Barnes very close on the leg side to Pollard, an awkward left-hander; Pollard's pull was clean and middled.

Barnes, a 32-year-old Sydneysider with a reputation for fearlessness, fielded so close at short leg — barely four-and-a-half yards from the bat — that Bradman more than once asked him to retreat. Barnes refused.

In the first innings of the third Test, with Pollard on strike at 96 for 4, Ian Johnson tossed up an off-break. Pollard pulled it. The ball struck Barnes in the left ribs, low under the armpit. Barnes collapsed face-down. Lindwall, fielding nearby, said later it sounded 'like a wet sandbag'. Four Manchester policemen carried Barnes from the field on a stretcher.

He was admitted to Manchester Royal Infirmary with bruising the size of a dinner plate and one rib displaced; for a few hours doctors feared a heart contusion. He was kept ten days. He returned to bat at 5pm on the fifth day, padded so heavily he could barely walk, and lasted half an hour before dropping to the pitch in pain and being helped off. He took no further meaningful part in the tour and never played another full Test series.

“It hit him like a bullet.”

“He dropped like a fallen tree.”

Barnes returned for the fifth Test at The Oval but, by his own admission, not at full health. He played only one more Test (in 1951-52) before retiring; the Old Trafford blow shadowed the rest of his career.