Melbourne, Aug 23 (ANI): An Australian cricket statistician has claimed to have found the elusive 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.

Bradman's Test average of 99.94 runs is entrenched in Australian sporting history, but just four more runs spread over a career of nearly 20 years would have taken it to 100.

It has passed into cricket folklore that Bradman was bowled for a duck by little-known Englishman Eric Hollies.

Statistician Charles Davis, who has claimed to study old test match scorebooks, has found a "tantalizing clue" that Bradman may have scored four more runs than he has been awarded.

Writing in Fairfax newspapers, 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 1928-29 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 writes.

"There is no doubt that a recording error of some kind has occurred. So where do these runs belong?"

Davis surmises that either Ryder may have scored them at some other point of the innings, or they were not scored at all, or "just perhaps" Bradman scored them.

"It is all about the scoring, an activity usually taken for granted," he wrote.

Davis, a former scientist, also acknowledged that more potential errors could be revealed from other scorebooks that could lower the Bradman's Test average. (ANI)

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