Cricket's darkest phase: the Bodyline Series

New Delhi: How the term 'win at all costs' chose the English players as a medium to exhibit its ugly and ruthless side was for all the world to see in 1932-33.
Donald Bradman had begun to show the kind of form which would eventually take him to the exhalted status of being the best cricketer in the world and the English realised that. Legitimate deliveries were dealt with and easily scored of, ideas and creativity were running short by the minute and the 'Invincible' had started to rule the roost and exert their infulence on the gentleman's game.

The English had been smarting under the 2–1 defeat handed out to them by the Aussies in the the five-Test series in the 1930 Ashes. Bradman's average hovered around 100, approximately twice that of all other world-class batsmen and with this the fear that England might have to do something out of the ordinary to stop thie Aussie domination.
The creator of the game was clearly being shown that they are second-best time and time again, which did not sit well.
England feared that without resorting to drastic tactics, they might not be able to defeat Australia until Bradman retired which meant subjecting yourself to the inevitable battering and bruising for at least another decade.
Since legitimate treatment was a far-fetched idea, English cricketer Percy Fenders noticed something in 1930. After brief rain-spells in the 1930 Ashes series, Bradman was seen to be uncomfortable facing deliveries which bounced higher than usual at a faster pace, being seen to step back out of the line of the ball.
After discussing at length, the tactics that would be involved to inhibit the run-flow of the Aussie great, Douglas Jardine would then go down in history as an evergreen villain, a name everyone would remember for all the wrong reasons in cricketing folkore.
Come 1932-33, and Jardine would be captain of the English leading his troops to battle against the might of the Aussies. Jardine had given strict instructions to Harold Larwood and Bill Voce. Tha plan was simple. The cricket ball was pitched short so as to rise towards the body of the batsman on the line of the leg stump, in the hope of creating leg-side deflections that could be caught by one of several fielders in the quadrant of the field behind square leg.
The result, while bodyline was successful as a tactic with England regaining the Ashes with a 4–1 margin, it was considered unsporting and dangerous to the point it brought the two nations to a political stand-off.
Afte the series, many incidents similar to that of the 1932 series forced the governing body of cricket to tweak the laws in such a way so that farcical tactics like these could never ever be used.
That series saw emotion and violence at its crescendo in a game which was going through its puberty and any further damage could have sent the popularity plumetting down to abyssmal depths.