: Gideon Haigh
: On the Ashes
: Allen& Unwin
: 9781838959982
: 1
: CHF 13.80
:
: Sport
: English
: 416
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Nothing compares to the Ashes. The Ashes is always coming, even when it is finished. The Ashes is where hope, expectation, magic and chagrin flourish in equal measure, and performance is permanently burnished.'The best cricket writer in the world' Guardian'The Bradman of cricket writing' Sunday Telegraph'The finest cricket writer alive' The Australian'Australia&apo ;s finest writer on cricket' The Times'The most gifted cricket essayist of his generation' Richard Williams, Guardian In On The Ashes, Gideon Haigh, today's pre-eminent cricket writer, has captured over a century and a half of Anglo-Australian cricket, from WG Grace to Don Bradman, from Bodyline to Jim Laker's 19-wicket match, from Ian Botham's miracle at Headingley to the phenomena of Patrick Cummins and Ben Stokes, today's Ashes captains. From over three decades of covering The Ashes, Gideon has brought together an enduring vision of this timeless contest between Australia and England - the world's oldest sporting rivalry - from the colonial era to the present day.

Gideon Haigh is in his fortieth year as a journalist, has contributed to more than a hundred newspapers and magazines, and written 45 books, mainly about cricket, but also concerned with social history, cultural history, true crime, business and law. He writes for The Australian and The Times. He lives in Melbourne and his most recent book is An Unfinished Masterpiece, a history of Victoria's Parliament House.

Victor Trumper


PRINTING THE LEGEND (2016)*


One of my first cricket books was a slim black Sun paperback calledGreat Australian Cricket Pictures (1975). When I retrieve it from the shelf now, it falls open atpage 87, testifying to my boyhood fascination with the image thereon.

‘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 was not. So, in the context of assertion, fact and myth, was I introduced to the first cricketer of the past that ever registered with me and to what remains perhaps its oldest truly treasured image.

I had also, though I would be unaware of it for many more years, been introduced to the work of the pioneering Edwardian photographer George Beldam, in whose bookGreat Batsmen: Their Methods at a Glance (1905) the picture first appeared. Instead, as it usually is, the photograph of Trumper inGreat Australian Cricket Pictures appeared uncredited, undated, unaccounted for, as though it had taken itself – or even as though it wasn’t a photograph at all, but a keyhole vantage on 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. Nobody’s 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. Today’s 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 the residual Trumper reputation, even if a good deal of the residual Trumper reputation is based on the image.

When in 2015 I first contemplated writing a book about Trumper, convention drew me towards a biography. Yet I also experienced misgivings. It was 113 years since his zenith when, on the 1902 tour of England, he made 2570 runs at 48.49 with eleven hundreds, including one before lunch on the first day of the Old Trafford Test: though perhaps no batsman had ever batted so brilliantly in a Test match, no eyewitness surived.

Of Trumper, three previous biographers had struggled to make much. The primary material was thin, the residual mythology thick. 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 standard sources is a little like entering a hall of m