The book is well presented, but is it too meandering? If you look at it from Gideon Haigh’s point of view, he has been driven by a TRUMPER PASSION, nay an obsession! And you can’t circumscribe a man who is in the throes of such an emotion. We will have to give Haigh considerable leeway, as he strives to give a wholeness to the Trumper story.
In the last paragraph of thisbook, the author, GideonHaigh, writes: “Has Smithheard of Victor Trumper, I wondered? Possibly. George Beldam? Definitely not. Never mind: he sort of knows them anyway.”
Now, who is Smith? It’s Steve Smith, the present Australian captain, who was the understudy to Michael Clarke last year, when Haigh saw him practising at the Oval during the Ashes series.
WHO IS VICTOR TRUMPER? It may be regarded as sacrilege to even pose this question, but just as Haigh is doubtful whether Smith knows about Trumper, not many may even recall this star Australian batsman, who passed away in 1915 after having been supposed to have been born on November 2, 1877 (supposed because no official records are available).
Now what was so special about Trumper? In his heyday, he was the most popular cricketer in Australia and acknowledged to be the best batsman in the world. Albert Knight waxes lyrical in a passage from The Complete Cricketer (1906), which appears as an epigraph in Chapter 5 of Haigh’s offering, “In Victor Trumper we have seen the very poetry and heard the deep and wonderful music of batsmanship. Not the structures of a great mentality, not the argument of logic, but a sweet and simple strain of beauty, the gift of the gods alone. Stylish in the highest sense, orthodox, yet breaking all canons of style, Trumper is just himself.”
It’s time to take a look at George Beldam. An amateur batsman of merit and a photographer with ideas who improved as he went along, Beldam hit pay dirt in the English summer of 1905 at the Oval when he captured on his Adams Videx camera Victor Trumper in practice, jumping out with bat raised in preparation for a straight drive. The batsman’s right foot is partially grounded while the left hangs in the air.
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