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Steve Smith is the 21st century edition of a fearless Victor Trumper

1st January, 2017
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Victor Trumper (George Bedlam, National Portrait Gallery)
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1st January, 2017
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“I tell you the greatest cricketer of them all was Trumpeter!”

Many decades ago, when we were young and our faces were baked brown from Q-Tol and the sun, a group of us touring representative cricketers were sitting in a roof-top beer garden at Napier, a provincial town in the lower half of the North Island of New Zealand. We were well lubricated. It was a hour or so before the beginning of the New Year.

And we are arguing, genially and loudly, about the greatest batsman of all time.

Most of us plumped for Don Bradman. How could you not? His average in Tests and first-class cricket was several standard deviations higher than any other batsman.

Even when he “failed” during the Bodyline series he still averaged 57, a number that would have been regarded as a triumph by any other batsman, in any other series and in any other era. Sir Jack Hobbs, arguably the greatest batsman English cricket has produced, had a lifetime Test average of 57.

I quoted the story of fast bowler Ernie McCormack being hit for five successive fours in an over to Bradman in a Sheffield Shield match, then having the great man covering up to the last two balls of the over, bat, nose, pads seemingly everything behind the ball allowing it no chance of getting through to his stumps and the sweating bowler turning to the gnomish batsman and calling out in exasperation: “Give us a chance, Don!”

That was what it was like bowling to Bradman in his pomp. Any ball that had the potential to be scored was off was scored off. But any ball that had the potential to dismiss him was defended with every defensive resource at his disposal.

The Bradman run rate was a thing of virtual mechanical perfection, rather like a driverless car avoiding accidents and journeying quickly and safely to its destination.

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Bradman hit only one six in his Test career. Why? Because any ball hit in the air had the potential to be caught. By not hitting in the air Bradman calculated that he eliminated one of the ways a batsman can be dismissed.

Asked once about how good a fellow high-scoring batsman was, Bradman replied: “He could be a great batsman but he hits sixes.”

Stories like these flowed down the river of our Bradman memories ever more extravagantly in direct relationship to the flow of beer being poured down our gullets.

Australia's greatest ever batsman, Sir Don Bradman

Our manager on the tour was a veteran Wellington first grade sort of off-spin bowler, Diddy Knapp. Diddy, a veteran with a Groucho Marx loping run-up, bowled slowish length stuff, a bit like Fred Titmus. He was a practitioner of the old school philosophy that “if they think you’re spinning, you are spinning the ball.”

When he appealed he’d turn to the umpire and call out: “What do you reckon, son?”

To our insistent advocacy for Don Bradman, replete with all the supporting statistics including his iconic Test average of 99.94, Diddy Knapp continued beer after beer to insist on the primacy of his man, Trumpeter.

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Who was this Trumpeter that Diddy was talking about?

One of my colleagues on the tour was Don Neely, later a first-class cricketer, a noted cricket historian and the chairman of selectors for the New Zealand national cricket team in the golden age of Richard Hadlee and Martin Crowe.

A scholar of the cricket game even then, Don assured me as we made our shaky way back to our rooms that Diddy was talking about Victor Trumper.

Of course, I had heard about Trumper alias Trumpeter. But although I devoured cricket books and sports magazines like Sporting Life and Sports Novels (two splendid Australian publications) I had a superficial reading acquaintanceship with Trumper.

There was, in fact, very little that I knew about Trumper or his cricketing achievements.

We knew all about Bradman, The Don.

We even knew that he refused to have a net in New Zealand when his ship made a stop in Auckland. We knew, too, that when he batted for South Australia against a New Zealand side on their way back from a tour England he was dismissed for a low score off the bowling of New Zealand’s 1930s equivalent of Hadlee, Jack Cowie.

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Most importantly, we knew all his heroics with the bat against England in all the series in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, especially that last tour in 1948 that was so vividly described in Jack Fingleton’s masterly “Brightly Fades The Don.”

It might surprise Australians but for New Zealanders in my youth at least it was an accepted fact of life that they supported Australia in cricket against England with almost the same passion that they invested with the All Blacks.

But Victor Trumper? It was only in the years after I came to Australia, back in the late 1970s, that I began to realise what a towering figure in the history of cricket he was.

One of the great pleasures of going with my wife on her morning swims at Clovelly Beach is the walk through Waverley Cemetery and every time saying a prayer at the unpretentious grave, marked VIC, of Victor Trumper.

Then mainly through a friendship with the Trumper tragic Rodney Cavalier, the former chairman of the SCG Trust and an outstanding Minister for Education in the Wran Government, I started to learn about the greatness of Trumper as a cricketer and as a man.

It was Cavalier who was the essential agent in ensuring that the great new sweeping stand at the Randwick end of the SCG was named after Victor Trumper.

The stand covers in part the old Hill area. In a front tier of seats is a statue of the great Gabba at the spot on the hill where he used to sit and yell out advice and encouragement to the various players undergoing his partisan scrutiny.

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Rodney Cavalier had this to say at the opening of the Victor Trumper Stand in December, 2008: “Victor Trumper is the finest Test cricketer Australia has produced. His peers did not have a bad word to say of him in life or death. No-one who saw Victor Trumper conceded they ever saw his equal.”

It should be noted that this heroic (and deservedly so) appreciation was only eight years on from Trumper being omitted from an Australian cricket team of the 20th century that was endorsed by the Australian Cricket Board.

The problem, of course, is that Trumper’s raw statistics just do not (or apparently do not) stack up against a number of other Australian batsmen over the decades, and certainly pale into seeming insignificance compared to Bradman’s astonishing statistics.

Ashley Mallett, one of Trumper’s biographers, has noted that Don Bradman himself could not come to terms with the equation of Victor Trumper’s greatness as a batsman and his relatively insignificant Test batting average.

Bradman, Mallett recalled, would ask the likes of Alan Kippax and Arthur Mailey why they thought so highly of him: “How can you speak so glowingly of a batsman who averaged 39?” he would insist.

Mallett’s response to this critique by Bradman made the case that there are averages and runs and other averages and runs. How you score your runs and when you score them are factors that need to be considered, he argued, when the greatness or otherwise of a batsman is being considered.

“Alongside Bradman’s figures Trumper’s statistics pale into seeming insignificance. In 48 Test matches Trumper scored 3163 runs at an average of 39. He hit eight centuries, with a high of 214 not out against South Africa at the Adelaide Oval in 1910-11, and 13 half-centuries. The figures don’t reflect Trumper’s mastery of batting on uncovered wickets which were laid bare to rain, then a searing sun. When those steamy, muddy surfaces started to dry out they were called ‘sticky dogs.’

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“Bad pitches were a challenge and a joy to Trumper. In January 1904 he scored 74 out of Australia’s total of 122 against the wiles of Wilfred Rhodes and George Hirst on such a sticky dog… Trumper’s genius with the bat on that wicket enthralled everyone.”

The Victor Trumper Society has recently published a fascinating analysis of Trumper’s play in difficult situations and treacherous pitches entitled “Statistics don’t lie… do they? Trumper’s ‘Category 4′ innings.” The analysis was written by Renato Carini, MBE, UNE.

Carini’s definition of a Category 4 innings is this: “Extremely difficult where batting second and the visitors have made 450+ (in Australia only): batting third and facing a deficit of 150+ (in Australia only): batting last and chasing 400+ (in Australia only).”

Trumper faced these situations seven times in his career and scored 861 runs at an average of 166.8. The runs of the other 10 Australian batsmen on these seven occasions totalled 936.

According to Carini, Trumper’s contribution in these situations were “so significant” that if Australia were batting third, 150+ behind and Trumper opened, “Australia would statistically be the favourites to win.”

Carini’s summary of these statistics is provocative: “Making comparisons across eras is a dubious practice. However, comparisons within the same generation are generally considered to be valid. In this way, statisticians might say that Don Bradman’s 99.94 average was twice that of his peers: Jack Hobbs’ 57 average was perhaps 1.5x that of his peers: Ricky Ponting is 1.2x his rivals. To outperform your colleagues as Trumper did in Category 4 innings by a margin of 5x is, I believe, without precedent.”

But, essentially, comparing averages in cricket is like giving the vital statistics of a car to decide its allure to its own generation and to later generations.

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It is the impact that the car makes visually that is almost as important as its mechanical efficiencies.

The Victor Trumper impact on his fellow players, adoring crowds and future generations is at the heart of his claims to greatness.

Arunabha Sengupta has written a loving account of this impact in a recent article, “Victor Trumper – the batsman often rated above Don Bradman”:

“Trumper shared his Test debut with another great of the era, Wilfred Rhodes. Ages later when Rhodes was asked about the greatest batsman who he came up against, he responded: ‘There was only one, Victor Trumper.'”

And here is Sengupta’s account of how Trumper scored a century before lunch in a Test against England and entranced for life a watching 12 year old, Neville Cardus: “In the fourth Test at Old Trafford in 1902, Australian captain Joe Darling courageously opted to bat on a soft wicket after rain, and Archie MacLaren told his formidable bowlers Stanley Jackson, Rhodes, Bill Lockwood, Fred Tate and Len Braund, to concentrate on keeping Trumper quiet, and the match would be theirs …

“Trumper got his century before lunch on the first morning, in 115 minutes, the first batsman to achieve the feat. Australia won a heart stopping thriller by 3 runs …

“Cardus, just 12, when he watch this innings, wrote decades later: ‘His cricket burns in my memory with the glow and fiery hazard of the actual occasion, the wonderful and all-consuming ignition. He was the most gallant and handsome batsman of them all.'”

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In 1963 the then Sir Neville Cardus was asked by Wisden to select “Six Giants of the Wisden Century” for that venerable publication’s 100th annual edition.

In alphabetical order, the six players selected by Cardus were:
Sydney Barnes, Don Bradman, W.G.Grace, Jack Hobbs, Tom Richardson, Victor Trumper.

On Don Bradman, Cardus had this to say: “Sir Donald Bradman (hereinafter to be named Bradman or The Don), must be called the most masterful and prolific maker of runs the game has known so far. He was, in short, a great batsman. Critics have argued that he was mechanical. So is a majestically flying aeroplane.

“The difference between Bradman and, say, Victor Trumper as batsmen was in fact the difference between an aeroplane and a swallow in flight.

“Discussing him entirely from the point of view of a writer on the game, I am happy to say that he was for me a constant spur to ideas. A newspaper could not contain him. He was, as far as a cricketer can be, a genius.”

On Victor Trumper, Cardus said this: “It is futile to ask who was the greatest batsman? There are different orders of greatness. Talent, even genius, is conditioned by the material circumstances in which it is developed.

“Victor Trumper was the embodiment of gallantry whenever he made his runs. He was a chivalrous batsman, nothing mean or discourteous in any of his movements or intentions at the wicket. ‘He had no style,’ wrote C.B. Fry of him, ‘but he was all style.’

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“But not by counting Victor’s runs, not by looking at any records, will you get the slightest idea of Trumper’s glorious cricket. You might as well count the notes of the music of Mozart.”

I agree with these assessments. If Victor Trumper was the Mozart of cricket, then Don Bradman was its Beethoven.

Victor Trumper, like Mozart, died relatively young in June 1915. He was 37. He was already a legend. The Bulletin published a poem by Victor Daley in March 1904 titled simply “Trumper.”

“Ho Statesmen, Patriots, Bards make way!
Your fame has sunk to zero:
For Victor Trumper is today
Our one Australian hero …”

Some months ago, to honour the centenary of Victor Trumper’s death, a group of Trumperians, organised by Rod Cavalier and the indefatigable Ron Cardwell (one of cricket’s greatest benefactors), made a pilgrimage to Trumper Park, in the Paddington area of Sydney’s eastern suburbs.

This was a ground where Trumper scored five centuries for his Paddington CC, and a 94.

We lounged around in the pavilion overlooking the oval where the great batsman thrilled the local with his spectacular hitting and listened to an enthralling lecture from James Cattlin on “Victor Trumper at Trumper Park.”

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The lecture went into the history of the Paddington CC, how the oval and its pitch at Glenmore Road were created and how great crowds came to see the champion bat at the oval that was later named after him and at the other cricket grounds in suburban Sydney: “Trumper opened the 1904-05 season with a ‘Bewildering brilliant display’ of batting, thrilling the crowd of 3000 with a ‘bewildering brilliant display’ of batting, thrilling the crowd of 3000 at Waverley Park making 189 no out including 15 hits over the fence and 22 fours …

“During the week Hanson Carter, Trumper’s partner in their sports store, casually mentioned that his team-mate Rose, a young leg-spinner, revealed that he had perfected a ball that would keep Trumper quiet … Trumper opened Paddington’s second inning scoring 14 runs off the first four overs: after 35 minutes 120 runs were on the board. In two overs from Rose the champion hit consecutively two fours then two sixes, then the next over three sixes in a row … Rose was taken off after two more overs, finishing with an analysis of six overs no maidens 77 runs and one wicket (not Trumper’s).”

James Cattlin ended his speech by turning away to face the oval and telling us listeners gathered with him: “While we only have the words and perhaps the scorecards from the past to explain Trumper’s genius we can gain an impression of his greatness. As a past player I read the accounts and picture in my mind the scene here, his array of shots, his ability to dominate the bowling, building momentum of an innings, his competitiveness and the thrill of seeing the ball sail over the fence when he was on song.”

We have, in fact, more than the words and the scorecards to explain Trumper’s genius. The opening lines of Kevin Pye’s poem “Victor Trumper still worthy 100 years on” makes this statement:

“We’ve all seen the famous photo of his dance beyond the crease –
the long stride and the drive to come is an all-time favourite piece …”

Ah, the famous photo of Trumper’s “dance beyond the crease.” This is a reference to arguably the most iconic of all cricket photos, George Beldam’s image of Victor Trumper, “Jumping Out.”

victor-trumper-jumping-out

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This photo is the subject of a brilliant book by Gideon Haigh, ‘Stroke of Genius: Victor Trumper and the shot that changed cricket’ (Hamish Hamilton an imprint of Penguin Books, 2016).

To my mind, and as someone who has read virtually the entire body of cricket literature, non-fiction and fiction, Gideon Haigh is the best cricket writer who has ever put words together to explain the mysteries and marvels of the game that has been described, unkindly by Robin Williams, as “baseball on valium.”

‘Stroke of Genius’ is a wonderful tour of discovery around the photography of cricket, the history of photography, the creation of an iconic image, the impact of this image on the imagination and playing efforts of future great players, the Trumper legend, its contradictions, its legacies, how ideals on and off the cricket field have been created, and how the game has been and is watched and recorded.

According to Ron Cardwell, the book is about “the essence of memory, its revival and keeping the flame” and is “one of the most important sports books in modern times.”

This book is a tour de force of research (that Don Bradman’s elder brother born in 1904 was named Victor is an interesting fact revealed by Haigh).

There are insights and discussion into so many contested areas of cricket controversy: the Bradman – Fingleton/O’Reilly rivalry, how batting has evolved in technique and ambition from the days of Grace through to the present times, did Victor Trumper really care about records, and how we actually have ‘seen’ the game from the days when only non-moving images could be recorded through to the modern era when everything is revealed in HD, close-up and slow motion.

The cornerstone supporting all these many discussions which are written in exact and sometimes luminous prose is a detailed account of how George Beldam achieved his famous ‘Jumping Out’ image of Victor Trumper:

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“The stroke is both instantly recognisable as the platonic ideal of a straight drive, returning the ball from when it came, and uniquely Trumper’s: this is the way to play it, yet only THIS batsman can play it THIS way. Trumper hurtles headlong across the frame, insouciantly out of his ground, taking what’s implied is a second stride towards the ball, the safety of the crease far behind …

“Trumper’s quickness, meanwhile is conveyed by the picture’s tiny tincture of imperfection … Batspeed sometimes confounded Beldam: the nearer the bat to the approaching ball, the likelier it would be bowed or blurred on the print … Not here: in the top left of ‘Jumping Out,’ Trumper’s bat is not only captured at the point of perfect stillness before commencing its downswing, but slightly tilted to pronounce its wandlike slimness … the open sky at the top right suggests an exit point for the stroke. But in the lower right, Trumper’s forward-flung front foot is ever-so-slightly blurred.”

Don Bradman in his masterly ‘The Art of Cricket’ uses ‘Jumping Out’ as a splendid example of the straight drive with the caveat that Trumper’s hands are “very high up on the bat for technical perfection.”

To my mind, part of the ‘problem’ with the continuing life of the Bradman legacy is that there are no heirs of the Bradman method. And there is no iconic image that encapsulates that method the way ‘Jumping Out’ does for the Trumper heritage.

There is no Bradman school of batting. No Australian batsman has emulated his circular pick-up and downward sweep of the bat. Nor has his brutal, relentless, machine-like churning out of massive amounts of runs has ever been matched, or is ever likely to.

Bradman had no successors, in method or results. He is like a once-in-a-thousand-year force of nature.

But the Trumper legacy has a life-line going back to the great batsman and forward to our own times. There is a connection between Trumper and a golden line of NSW/Australian batsmen who have embraced his methods and ideals.

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This golden NSW line started after Trumper with Archie Jackson, then moved through to Alan Kippax, Stan McCabe, a precocious Ian Craig, Richie Benaud (a dashing batsman in his youth who affected the Trumper three-quarter sleeves and the open shirt), Ray Flockton, Norm O’Neill, Doug Walters, Mark Waugh, Michael Clarke, and now in perhaps the closest replication of the Trumper style, especially its fearlessness in any situation, Steve Smith.

Steve Smith celebrates a run out

Gideon Haigh hints at this Trumper-Smith link in the last paragraphs of his book. He describes how he spent the day before the Fifth Test of the Ashes of 2015 in the outfield of The Oval with the photographer Philip Brown, with a copy of ‘Jumping Out’ in their hands, in search of the same vantage point as Beldam used in 1905 to take his iconic photograph:

“As we watched, Steve Smith was immersed in a session of throwdowns on more or less the spot where Trumper and Beldam had rendezvoused eleven decades earlier … We left him at it. The following day he made a hundred.

“Has Smith heard of Victor Trumper, I wondered? Possibly. George Beldam? Definitely not. Never mind: he sort of knows them anyway.”

This essay was written during the Melbourne Test against Pakistan. Between the writing I watched the Test, especially the way Steve Smith scored his 17th Test century, 165 not out, in the same manner as Trumper flogged young Rose at Waverley Oval all those decades ago.

Smith goes into the SCG Test with the chance to become the first batsman since Don Bradman to average 60 in Test cricket after playing in 50 Tests.

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Statistics provided by Fox Sports indicate that to reach the 60/50 milestone Smith needs to score 71 runs at Sydney if he is dismissed twice. If he is dismissed once, he needs only 11 runs. A not out will automatically give him the achievement.

If Smith becomes a 60/50 player he will join Bradman, Herbert Sutcliffe and Jack Hobbs, exulted company for any youngish batsman to join.

Currently, Smith has the third highest average (60.63) in the history of Test cricket among batsman scoring at least 3,000 runs.

For decades after Don Bradman retired, every young cricketer who had a purple patch of run-scoring was heralded as the new Bradman, a kiss of death on any youngster. Let us be honest about this. There will never be another Bradman. His batting statistics will never be equalled or bettered.

But Victor Trumper? That is another matter.

CB Fry back in 1905, after watching Trumper in all his glory in the earlier English summer, wrote this famous analysis about the great batsman:

“Victor Trumper is, perhaps the most difficult batsman in the world to reduce to words. He has no style, and yet he is all style. He has no fixed canonical method of play, he defies all the orthodox rules, yet every stroke he plays satisfies the ultimate criterion of style – minimum effort, maximum effect. His whole bent is aggressiveness towards the bowling, and he plays a defensive stroke only as a last resort. Yet such is his command of his strokes, that even when he is scoring his fastest he gives the impression of perfect safety.

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“He has, it may be said without exaggeration, a marvellous gift for timing a cricket ball. But, above all, he trusts his eye.”

During Steve Smith’s long innings at the MCG, Bill Lawry made the observation: “There is something special about this fellow.”

Quite right. The CB Fry analysis of the batting method of Victor Trumper could be applied without changing a single word to the batting of Steve Smith.

So we should give away the impossible search for the new Bradman. That Holy Grail will never be discovered.

But let Australian cricket rejoice, though, in the fact that we are being blessed right now with a 21st century version of Victor Trumper in the form of the sensational talents and achievements of Steve Smith.

Kevin Pyle in his poem ‘Victor Trumper still worthy 100 years on’ anticipates Steve Smith as the modern Trumper with this tribute to the great man, a tribute that can be applied as well to the current skipper of the Australian cricket XI:

“He played the role of cavalier, in the interests of his team.
Beyond the boundary fence and gate, integrity his peer,
he was energetic, modest, yet quixotic without fear.”

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