



Agar adds to the story of sport

Illustration: Jim Pavlidis

Illustration: Jim Pavlidis


Before Ashton Agar got out for 98, shrugged and smiled, Australian cricket was not in a good place. All popular sports rely to a large extent on telling a story.

The story involves great games, the form of players, who's in, who's out, plus the various dramas, scandals and scuttlebutt. The sum of these stories adds up to the season.

Australian cricket's problem, or one of them, is that, each summer, it now fails to tell a coherent story. There's too much going on in too many different places. Too many players coming and going. Too many matches. Robbed of what Paul Keating called ''an over-arching narrative'', the game becomes reduced to action sequences.

The action, however athletic, is soon forgotten since it is quickly swamped by more action and then more action after that.

Agar gave Australian cricket - indeed, Australian sport - the sort of story kids dream up in their heads at night, and every sports fan is a kid at heart.

Agar's innings combined a sense of history with a moment of sporting grace, an irresistible combination. Suddenly, in its wake, everyone was talking about cricket again.

In an interview, Agar's father, John, said his son's sporting philosophy was based on two slogans: ''Play without fear'' and ''Play with freedom''. I don't wish to burden Agar further by comparing him to Victor Trumper as a player, but I will pay Agar the compliment of saying that when I heard his father express his sporting philosophy my first thought was of Trumper.

Trumper is an Australian sporting legend, up there with the likes of Phar Lap. (Possibly the three best lines in Australian sports literature come from Peter Porter's poem Phar Lap In The Melbourne Museum: ''It is Australian innocence to love/The naturally excessive and be proud/Of a thoroughbred bay gelding who ran fast''.)

If ever a cricketer played without fear and with freedom, it was Trumper. Don Bradman could never understand the fuss about Trumper who, as a Test batsman, averaged only 39.

Neville Cardus, the great English cricket writer, responded by saying that judging Trumper by the number of runs he scored was like judging the poet Shelley by the number of lines he wrote and not what he wrote in them.

Trumper died in June 1915 from a kidney disease at the early age of 38. It was Ashley Mallett, one of his biographers, who pointed out that Trumper died just as the horrific casualty lists from the Gallipoli landing were beginning to be posted around Australia. A generation of our best and brightest young men were in the process being slaughtered. The period before that dark time would be remembered as a golden age; Trumper was acknowledged as its brightest light.

Trumper batted like no one before him and possibly no one since. In both England and Australia, he was recognised as having taken the game to a whole new level. W.G.Grace, having initially disparaged him, declared him his successor as cricket's champion player.

His agility and timing enabled him to invent shots that were inconceivable to others. This was a period of uncovered wickets and the worse the pitch, the more inventive he became. He was once observed to hit four consecutive balls of the same line and length to four different parts of the ground. That was the fun of the game to him and, if he made a century, he was known to give his wicket away so the next man could have a hit.

An English cricketer of the period, Pelham Warner, wrote: ''The greater the cricketer the more modest he should be, and Trumper was the most modest of all the modest cricketers I have met.''

My two favourite Australian sporting images are of Trumper and footballer Haydn Bunton.

The image of Bunton, beautifully captured by sculptor Louis Laumen in the statue outside the MCG, has the triple Brownlow medallist leaping, ball beneath his arm, earth scarcely in view. He looks like Mercury, the Roman messenger of the gods.

The iconic photo of Trumper has him dancing down the wicket to drive, bat raised high, perfectly poised and wholly attacking. ''He had no style and yet he was all style,'' wrote Englishman C.B. Fry. Trumper, incidentally, played Australian football while growing up in Sydney in the 1890s.

Arthur Mailey played for Australia as a leg-spinner in the 1920s. He wrote a wonderful piece about playing cricket against Trumper, his idol, as a youth. Merely to be on the same playing field was enough for the ecstatic youth but with his third ball, a wrong'un, he fooled the great batsman and had him stumped.

Knowing he was beaten, Trumper made no attempt to recover his ground. Passing the young bowler, he smiled and said: ''You were too good for me.'' Mailey concluded: ''There was no triumph in me as I watched the receding figure. I felt like a boy who had killed a dove.''

Melbourne indie band The Lucksmiths converted Mailey's article into a song called Victor Trumper.

The lyrics, on their own, form a terrific little poem about sport.

One-hundred years later, we're still talking about Victor Trumper. That's a story.

HuffPost Australia

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