s befallen Victor Trumper, effaced by his own image, reduced at t

Grand final week. Anyone involved at the top level in our game aspires to be a part of it. Its an entirely different beast.As much as the game is the same, the ramifications come 6pm Saturday are so much more intense. For some, glory will reign. For others, dejection and what ifs will become all-consuming.Having come so close to tasting the ultimate success in 2009 and 10, grand final week has become a difficult one to bear.I recall the excitement of our playing group, our frenzied supporters and the exercise in futility at trying to treat it like a normal week. I remember the games themselves and the intensity at which they were played. I will never forget the tense last quarters where every contest became critical.Unfortunately, I also remember the heartache, the missed opportunity and hope for redemption that followed.Generally my feeling towards this week now is one of avoidance. Being a current player who still harbours dreams of winning a premiership, Im quite content being on the other side of the world, away from all the noise. Ignorance is bliss I guess you could say.I envy greatly the Bulldogs and Swans players who will take the field this weekend to the point of jealousy, and hope that 2017 evolves into the Saints shot at greatness.If Im feeling this way, I wonder to myself how must Bob Murphy be feeling? It seems every year there is a hard luck story associated with playing in the big dance. Im not sure many come as close, or have resonated with the football public than Bob this week.Bob and I have become great mates. Our wives hit it off last year in Ireland which is the prerequisite of any great friendship. When Bob went down in Round 3 this year, the football family collectively sighed and hoped that the lure of a flag in 2017 would dictate he played on.I didnt anticipate 2016 would be the year the Bulldogs broke their 55-year grand final drought but knowing the man and leader that Bob is, and the influence he has on that group along with Luke Beveridge and Eason Wood, Dale Morris, Matthew Boyd and Co, Im not surprised.Following the incredible preliminary final victory over the Giants, the outpouring of emotion by, and for, Bob was clear for all to see. Missing a grand final would be an incredibly difficult time for any player - it is no doubt magnified by Bobs history of coming so close previously, being a dedicated and decorated one-club player for 17 years and the opportunity to become just the second Bulldogs premiership captain.Placed in the same shoes, I would feel cheated. However, there is still an incredibly important role to play. He needs to ensure the group remains focused on the job, while still allowing for an element of enjoyment that accompanies grand final week. He will do his best to ensure the participating players are the story, not him.Bob will also no doubt have a role in the coaches box on Saturday, and will fulfill his role as captain. While hell feel extreme levels of disappointment, it wont show until after the final siren. He is just that sort of bloke.Of all the footballers Ive encountered in 16 years, he is perhaps the most balanced, the most worldly and well-adjusted. But even for him, this will be hard to swallow.Aliir Aliir finds himself in a similar situation, having been ruled out with a knee injury suffered against Geelong last weekend. Given his tender age, he will be hopeful of another shot in what will hopefully be a long career, and given Sydneys abundance of talent and ability to seemingly challenge every season, few would argue that wont materialise. Nonetheless, those of us with more experience know how hard these chances are to come by.In American sports, those who have played even a few games during the season with the eventual championship winners are considered champions themselves regardless of whether they actually played in the title game. In that situation either Aliir or Bob would be premiership players come Saturday evening. Im not sure thats a model we would ever support in our sport, but it would somewhat soften the blow in situations such Bobs and Aliirs this week.Now to the players who will take the field on Saturday.Im not sure I can recall a more fascinating match-up. The Swans, full of genuine stars and role players, against the system and spirit of the Bulldogs. Thats not to say the Swans dont play with spirit. Both teams play a tough, relentless, pressure-filled style that requires nothing short of 100 percent effort, 100 percent of the time. Both teams excel at winning the contested ball and applying pressure when they dont.We can take it as written that both midfields in particular will bring that formula, so the key will be handling that pressure and using the ball efficiently.Both sides deploy ruckman devoid of a Nic Naitanui-like advantage at stoppages, so the battle in the clinches should be particularly fierce. I give the slight edge to the Swans in this area as Josh Kennedy, Luke Parker, Dan Hannebery and Co. have the experience and size advantage. Once the ball gets on the outside however, the Bulldogs through Luke Dahlhaus, Caleb Daniel, Lachie Hunter and Jack Macrae have the legs to hurt the Swans mids, as GWS showed a few weeks ago.Neither forward line can expect too much quality service, as is usually the case in grand finals. The majority of delivery coming inside 50 will be what we call dirty ball, so the ability to create something out of nothing will be important.The Bulldogs generally employ a defensive zone in the back half, protecting dangerous space rather than playing directly on an opponent, which often has them in a position to win first possession. The danger for the Sydney forwards will be calling for the ball out the back when a teammate is rushed and under pressure. If the Swans forwards present at the ball and attack the contest as they did last week, they will be hard to contain.Then theres the Buddy factor.Lance Franklin enters the game in terrific touch so Dale Morris and Fletcher Roberts will play crucial roles.Up the other end, Im excited to watch Dane Rampe. He is uncompromising, great with the ball and rarely beaten. He looms as the most likely match-up for Jake Stringer.Franklin and Stringer appear the men most likely to catch fire and kick a winning score for their respective teams but as Clay Smith and Tom Papley proved last week, the finals are a time for unlikely heroes.My prediction: Sydney by three points.Cheap Mariners Jerseys . Miller finished in two minutes, 6.09 seconds, one day before the first medal race on the Alpine schedule. The 36-year-old American also turned in the top time in Thursdays opening training session. Custom Mariners Jerseys . But what about the officials? Every sport has officials and they also have stories about hard work and sacrifice but their accomplishments are seldom recognized by anyone outside their inner circle. http://www.custommarinersjersey.com/ .H. -- Matt Kenseth made it 2 for 2 in the Chase, holding off teammate Kyle Busch to win Sunday at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. Custom Edgar Martinez Jersey .C. -- When North Carolina freshman Ryan Switzer reported to training camp in August he was a little miffed to learn he was third on the depth chart at punt returner. Wholesale Custom Mariners Shirts . The lawyers filed a 33-page amended complaint Tuesday in federal court in Manhattan, expanding on the suit originally filed Oct. 3 in New York Supreme Court. Arbitrator Fredric Horowitz last week refused to compel Selig to testify in the grievance, and Rodriguez then walked out of the hearing without testifying.One of the very first cricket books I was ever given, on the occasion of my tenth birthday, was a slim black paperback called Great Australian Cricket Pictures (1975). When I retrieve it from the shelf now, it falls open at page 87, corroborative of my boyhood fascination with the image it contains.Trumpered read the bad-pun heading for the short caption, which described Victor Trumper as one of our truly great cricketers, told me that he was the first to score a century before lunch in a Test match, which proved to be true, and once hit the first ball of a match for six, which did not. Such was my simultaneous introduction to the first cricketer from history who ever registered with me and to what remains perhaps its oldest truly treasured image, in the context of assertion, fact and myth.I had also, though I would be unaware of it many more years, been introduced to the work of the pioneering Edwardian photographer George Beldam, in whose book Great Batsmen: Their Methods at a Glance (1905) the picture first appeared. Instead, as it almost invariably does, the photograph of Trumper in Great Australian Cricket Pictures appeared uncredited, undated, unaccounted for, as though it had taken itself - or even as though it wasnt a photograph at all, but a keyhole view of the past. When not long after, I commenced reading about Trumper, it can only have been with the image of him jumping out to drive in mind.That was then, of course, although now may be less different than we think. Nobodys found a great many more photographs of Trumper, or at least thought to make the others that do exist more readily available to the online browser. Todays ten-year-old would encounter Trumper pretty much the same way as I did, simultaneously with his most famous pictorial representation: google Victor Trumper, and one is led to the image. For the more mature fan, meanwhile, the image attests to the residual Trumper reputation, even if a good deal of the residual Trumper reputation is based on the image.When last year I first contemplated writing a book about Trumper, convention drew me towards a biography. Yet I also experienced misgivings. Three previous biographers had struggled to make much of him. The primary material was thin, his period remote, his contemporaries long gone, and the mythology thick indeed.To write about any figure of the past is essentially to make a claim for them, to make a mission of substantiating their significance. In sport, the allure is of great deeds, stirring victories, public approbation. Yet legend is an uneasy companion of biography, if not an outright enemy. And to track the Trumper story through the obligatory sources is a little like entering a hall of mirrors. Everyone is quoting everyone else. Stories and their origins have long since parted ways. One channels, instead, impressions. My excellently iconoclastic friend Jarrod Kimber wrote about Trumper in Test Cricket: The Unauthorised Biography last year in terms of which Neville Cardus would not have disapproved - and lets just say that these two writers would not normally be thought of as singing from the same song sheet.So I struck a kind of bargain with the past. If dealing with legend was inevitable, why not look it in the eye rather than try to peer around it? Why not evaluate knowingly what a conventional biography would be unavoidably transacting in anyway? After all, its one of my favourite lines of Chestertons: Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.That didnt mean ignoring fact. What became Stroke of Genius still needed extensive biographical underpinnings - partly to illustrate legends deviations, partly because Trumper has been gradually winnowed away to a name and an image. But I was anxious to avoid what so many works about cricket history seem to become - chronologies of scores, transcriptions of match reports, recitations of anecdote. Thats not only because these are seldom truly enlightening, but because so much now lies within reach of the interested reader. Want to find out Trumpers scores in 1903-04? Use CricketArchive. Want to read what people said about these scores? Try Trove or the British Newspaper Archive. In some ways, those of us enticed by crickets past have yet to adapt to the modern accessibility of informational riches. In any case, what differentiated Trumper was not his scores so much as their interpretation, the heights of lyricism ascended in describing him, and the remarkable unanimity of opinion, so that their evocation by a single image did not in the end seem so unnatural - indeed, it would steadily become proof of claims for his aesthetic superiority.Heading off down this track, I grew interested in how cricket was seen before World War I. Cricket, of course, is quite a challenging game to watch live, for reasons of distance and speed, without some kind of technological enhancement. Way back when, illustrative forms - painting, engraving, early photography - tended to reflect that. They hovered at the boundary edge, and perforce took in the whole scene. Classics of illustration - like WH Masons A Cricket Match between the Counties of Sussex and Kent, at Brighton and Ponsonby Staples An Imaginary Cricket Match - foregrounded the crowd and recessed the cricket. The Victorian Ages outstanding cricket photographic work, CW Alcocks Famous Cricketers and Cricket Grounds (1892), posed players for wistful portraits, and provided venues as tranquil panoramas. Intimacy with action was undreamed of - until George Beldam.Quite why Beldam is not better known amazes me. Perhaps it is because he is sui generis - he belongs to a leisure society swallowed up by World War I. He was an amateur cricketer, for Middlesex and London County, who doubled as an amateur photographer: indeed it was one of the passing intrigues of researching my book to learn that photography underwent debates similar to those in cricket about amateurism and professionalism. A century on, were apt to deem amateurism a kind of effete dabbling. In photography as in cricket, Beldam was a furiously industrious perfectionist. Between 1904 and 1908, he took thousands of photographs for eight works of sports photography, five of them substantial: not just cricket but tennis, golf and even jujitsu. Nor is this just a matter of versatility. He had the confidence of his caste and skill. Its not a coincidence that Beldam persuaded cricketers to do what they did for no other photographer: he was one of them, and as an amateur, atop crickets social heap.Beldam had the further cachet of a creative partnership with the eras arbiter elegentiae, CB Fry. Not only was Fry the finest flower of English amateur sport - batsman, footballer, rugby player, athlete, scholar - but a prolific journalist and editor of an eponymous magazine of outdoor recreation. Fry had both the Victorian fascination with technique and the Edwardian infatuation with style - which he defined with a Ruskinian formulation about the maximum effect for the least apparent effort. Long entranced by the unique elan and deftness of his Sussex and England team-mate Ranjitsinhji, Fry was captivated by a photograph that Beldam took of Ranji at Hove in September 1904.These were not action photographs as we would now understand them. To bridge that abiding gap between boundary edge and action, Beldam circulated among his subjects during practice sessions and at intervals; sometimes he invited them to his home, where he had the gentlemanly indulgence of an outdoor and indoor pitch. Photography being such a novelty, and the idea of a glimmer of action so alluring, few if any seemed to say no to him.The photograph of Ranji was one of a portfolio collected after a Middlesex v Sussex county match, in which Beldam hit the winning run, put on his blazer, fetched his camera, erected his tripod, and pressed Ranji into going through his repertoire to Frys bowling - not even Philip Brown has pulled that kind of thing off. One of the images is clearly kindred with the photograph Beldam was to take of Trumper - Ranji is prancing out to drive, eyes flashing, front foot in mid-air. Fry, who had previously expressed reservations about photography, felt them give way: the image took up a full page of the next issue of C. B. Frys Magazine of Action and Outdoor Life across from an appreciative exposition.Beldams collaborations with Fry, Great Batsmen (1905) and Great Bowlers and Fielders (1906), signify such a breakthrough in the representation of cricket that they might almost have been of another sport, given their departure from the traditions of the portrait and the panorama, and their accent on the capture of the figure in motion. They reverse, in fact, crickets existing descriptive grammar. It was the first time cricketers had been shown in close quarters in the physical performance of their deeds; it was the first time image had taken true precedence over text, Frys captions serving only to tease out what Beldams photographs introduced. In detail and comprehensiveness these companion volumes may never even have been equalled - certainly, but for them, we would have no idea what cricket looked like before World War I. You can spend countless hours poring over them. You can spend countless hours poring over one photograph alone - and I should know, because I did.In Great Batsmens section on Trumper there are no fewer than 33 photographs - more than for any other subject. They were accumulated across two sessions in 1905, at Lords and at The Oval, separated by roughly two weeks. Pare those sessions apart and they are fascinatingly distinct. The former are a wide range of shots taken from more or less the same front-of-the-wicket off-side position, with Beldam acting as bowler while taking the photographs by means of a pneumatic push connected to the camera by a long cord - we know this because it was included in a diary entry by the painter Henry Scott Tuke, who was present on the occasion. The latter are, in the main, attempts to capture one stroke, a straight drive, from a variety of positions in an arc from mid-on to about fourth slip - we can surmise this from a photograph of Beldam at work at The Oval photographing Clem Hill, and published the same week in a London illustrated paper. No contact sheet survives, but Beldams objective is apparent. He craves the sensse of motion conveyed by the airborne front foot, which he had succeeded in capturing while photographing Ranji the year before.dddddddddddd He craves it so badly that for a few plates he does something very unusual in his oeuvre: he adopts a landscape framing, wider than high, rather than a portrait shape.What becomes Plate XXVII: Jumping out for a straight drive, taken from side-on, is a photograph as audacious as the shot it immortalised. Trumper is launching from outside his ground: the crease is falling away at bottom left. Trumper is surging into light: the gap in the skyline caused by Clayton Street stretching away from The Oval. Trumper is alone in his estate: there are no stumps, no fielders, no square-leg umpire. Trumpers bat is poised at the moment of perfect stillness before commencing its downswing, which is foretold by the horizontals and verticals of the background, and the empty space at top right into which we can imagine the ball vanishing. You come to the photograph for Trumper, but part from it with as much admiration for Beldam.Whats almost as fascinating, especially in our present day and age, is that the photograph was not immediately identified as a classic, as distinct from simply of superior quality. Like the aforementioned image of Ranji and another of FS Jackson, it was offered as a limited edition photogravure. Yet none of them sold out. And while Great Batsmen and Great Bowlers and Fielders were critically acclaimed, they were too expensive to sell widely. Reprographic and communications technologies were inadequate for the broad diffusion of Beldams images - a hundred years ago the only things that went viral were… well, viruses.At the time this actually didnt matter: Trumper had no immediate need of pictorial elaboration. And in the annals of iconic photography, delayed appreciation is not unusual. On the recent death of Muhammad Ali, virtually every news outlet adorned their obituary with Neil Leifers 1964 image of all-conquering Ali towering over the prone form of Sonny Liston. Yet 52 years earlier, the photograph had been buried deep in the recesses of Sports Illustrated, garnered little attention, won no award. It was rediscovered only when people had forgotten that the fight itself was a squib, and that what looks like Alis bray of triumph was actually a demand that Liston, widely suspected of taking a dive, get up.To say, as I have heard it said, that Trumpers greatness is based on a photograph, therefore, is a gross oversimplification. At the time and in the earthly decade he had remaining, Trumper was not just hugely admired but deeply loved: contemporaneous responses to him have an emotional incandescence that I suspect is almost unique. He also remained a decided enigma - something excluded from almost every account of his life, for example, is that he was an obdurate resister of administrative encroachments on what had been to that stage a player-led game. Perhaps it is this that accounts for his perdurable and adaptable reputation, that by his reticence he kept it free of complication, and also that he died, in 1915, along with a great many more beautiful, comforting, transitory things.For the Anglosphere after World War I, memory was an exquisite self-torture. So much loss, so much waste and decay. Looking back on Trumper was at least only bittersweet. At first he was recalled chiefly in print. His extoller-in-chief, in an ecumenical gesture, was the rising star of English cricket writing, Neville Cardus, who wrote in the Manchester Guardian as Cricketer. Cardus, of course, sought pitches of eloquence never before attempted in cricket writing; central to his critique, too, was the irrefutable inferiority of the cricket of his adulthood, with its serried professional ranks, to the cricket of his youth, with its confident amateur leadership. Of the latter, Trumper became the personification, unsullied and un-ageing. And it was in an elegy for Trumper in July 1926 that Cardus first trialled an evocative expression: Trumpers winged batsmanship was seen in the golden age of cricket [my italics]; he was, at his finest, master of some of the greatest bowlers the game has ever known.It was a conception Cardus would expand, burnish, celebrate and mourn the rest of his lengthy career. By the 1940s it had been entrenched by upper cases for G and A; by the 1960s it had been historicised by book-length treatments. Trumper did not hold the Golden Age up by itself. But by being Australian, being beautiful and being dead, he gave it a roundness and completedness that made it sound like more than an assuagement of fading class certainties.Then, in October 1927, fully 22 years after it was taken, Beldams photograph of Trumper was published for the first time in Australia, in the Sydney Mail, a popular weekly published on art paper. Whose decision it was we do not know, but it almost certainly involved the papers brilliant English-born pictorial editor, Herbert Fishwick. There were no jpegs and tifs: the Mail relied on a copy of the gravure taken down from the wall of the New South Wales Cricket Association, still reproduced a little hazily. But the caption writers excitement was unfeigned.Victor! To look at this picture (kindly lent by the N.S.W. Cricket Association) is to see Victor Trumper as we used to see him from the pavilions. See him and marvel! It does not show his face clearly, but as an action picture it is wonderful. No hesitancy here. He is stepping out to meet the ball. Strength, grace, and balance, combine to reveal joyous and youthful sense of mastery. What was the secret of this joyous freedom? Simply the beautiful character of Victor. All young players should know all that can be told of him, whose other name was Modesty.The odd thing is that had I elected to write a conventional biography of Trumper, Id have left him in 1915, when his definition and significance were still far from clear. As it is, Trumper took on a new, posthumous effulgence from the late 1920s, abetted by his image, which slipped seamlessly into a mass media with an expanding pictorial quotient. The year after the Sydney Mail published the photograph, it published Fishwicks stirring action portrait of Walter Hammond cover-driving - a perfect counterpart, in a way, the Englishman in Australia to balance the Australian in England as they helped establish an aesthetic continuum. But a greater influence still, I suspect, was just hoving into view. We tend to think now of Donald Bradman as becoming the monopolist of cricket fame from the 1930s, arising as he did in the age of radio, the wire photo, and a ceaselessly expanding newspaper and publishing industry. Yet Trumper was kept flickeringly alive by all those with reservations about the onrush of modernity, materialism, industrialisation and professionalism that Bradman embodied. Originating his dichotomy of Trumper as the bird in flight and Bradman as the aeroplane, Cardus could now flourish the most modern of empirical proofs. Look at the photographs of him [Trumper], doubting young Thomases of the skeptical present, and see how far he would venture beyond the creases rim at the sight of a well-tossed ball, Cardus wrote in Cricket (1930). His bat is held up behind him punitively, he is leaping to the ball, his every muscle responding to the demands of the will to power and victory. Administrators discomfited by Bradmans popular heft also looked back fondly: in 1930, the NSWCA placed a line drawing inspired by Beldams Trumper on the cover of its yearbook, where it remained 25 years.As deeply as Bradman interred his precursors records, then, he preserved a role for Trumper as a kind of romantic counterpoint to his overpowering rationalism. And while Trumper receded perhaps from the very front rank of fame, his spirit remained available for reproachment of modern mores, from joyless professionalism to flamboyant entrepreneurship. Trumpers centenary happened to fall on the eve of Kerry Packers World Series Cricket. The first public duty of Australias establishment captain Bob Simpson was to place a wreath on Trumpers grave - somewhat of an irony given that Trumper had so frequently been at loggerheads with the establishment of his own generation.In the generation or so since that centenary, the image has evolved further, and almost shaken off its subject: it is Trumper, the equivalent of an artist known by a single work, or even a public man by a solitary, resonant, if only partially grasped, idea or phrase, like, in Australia, AA The Cultural Cringe Phillips, or Donald The Lucky Country Horne. The concluding chapter of Stroke of Genius, which could easily have been several times as long, is concerned with the appropriation of the photograph as a free-floating art object. It turned out, for example, that the owner of the most superb representation, Louis Laumens one-and-a-quarter times life-size bronze of the image, has no interest in cricket: he is a collector who had some spare cash.The basis of iconoclasm as it was originally understood was the objection that icons had heretical powers to destroy the divine presence - that they, rather than what they represent, become the object of veneration. Perhaps in a secular and sporting sense, this is the fate that has befallen Victor Trumper, effaced by his own image, reduced at times simply to a leap, so that every ESPNcricinfo reader knows what is meant when it is said that Victor Trumper would have been proud of AB de Villiers or a youth batting near Premadasa Stadium is making a salute to Victor Trumper. Yet to complain of this would be pernickety. It is the image that has kept for Trumper an irreducible corner of this visual age, that brings him effortlessly up to date every time we see it. For all that Bradman is Australian crickets historical lodestar, no photographer ever succeeded in obtaining his aesthetic signature as Beldam did with Trumper. Without Beldams photograph, Trumper would be no more than a distant name with a fading echo, a statistical remnant buried deep beneath a centurys further achievement. And without Beldams photograph, I doubt Trumpers name would ever have detained me at an impressionable age, and lodged in my mind to the degree that I wished to write a book about him. ' ' '