Bert Oldfield's Skull Fractured by Larwood — Adelaide, 1933

Adelaide had already been inflamed by Woodfull's injury and the leaked 'two teams' rebuke. Oldfield, 38, was the senior wicketkeeper of the era and a universally liked figure in both dressing rooms.

Australia were chasing 532 to win in the fourth innings — a notional rather than real target. Oldfield came in at the fall of the sixth wicket with the match effectively gone. He was batting fluently when the lifter struck.

Oldfield, batting at 41 in the first innings, hooked at a Larwood ball that lifted more than expected. He misjudged it, the ball glanced off the splice into his right temple, and he collapsed. England's fielders, Larwood among them, ran to him; the bowler was visibly shaken. Oldfield staggered to his feet, said 'It wasn't your fault, Harold,' and was led from the field.

The ball had not been bowled with a Bodyline field. That detail was lost in the immediate uproar. The Adelaide crowd, already inflamed by Woodfull's injury two days earlier and by knowledge of the dressing-room scene with Warner, were on the edge of invading the field. Mounted police drew up in line on the western boundary. Bradman would later write that he genuinely believed there was 'a riot waiting to happen.'

Oldfield had a linear fracture of the frontal bone. He was taken to hospital, did not bat in the second innings, and missed the rest of the series. He returned to Test cricket in 1934 and played until 1937, but the Adelaide injury haunted him; he wore a wider, padded cap thereafter and never hooked the same way again.

Australia's Board cabled the MCC on 18 January. The 'unsportsmanlike' wording was provoked at least as much by Oldfield's skull as by Woodfull's chest. England replied tartly, offering to cancel the tour. Only Prime Minister Joseph Lyons's intervention — coupled with the financial cost of an abandoned series — kept the tour alive.

“It wasn't your fault, Harold.”

“I genuinely believed there was a riot waiting to happen.”

Oldfield was hospitalised with a linear fracture of the frontal bone but recovered without lasting neurological damage. He played his next Test in 1934 in England and continued until 1937, finishing with 130 dismissals (the wicketkeeper world record at the time). He always insisted that Larwood was not to blame for the Adelaide ball — though the field setting Jardine deployed for much of the series was, in his words, 'a different conversation altogether.'

For Larwood the moment was a personal grief. He visited Oldfield in hospital and, in his retirement memoir, said it was the worst day of his cricket life. Crowds at later Tests booed him for it for the rest of the tour.