Remembering an icon - 100 years on

As Steve Smith toasted his rise to top of the Test cricket totem with a celebratory hundred against Kent, cricket historians and enthusiasts have been gathering in Sydney to commemorate a century of far greater significance.

It is 100 years today since Victor Trumper – the man who some of those who saw both play argue was a better batsman than Bradman – fell victim to Bright’s Disease (acute kidney ailment) just seven months after his 37^th birthday.

The same age as current Test players Chris Rogers and Brad Haddin.

His funeral, which drew crowds estimated at more than 20,000 to view the cortege through Sydney’s streets, remains one of the largest displays of public mourning that Australia has witnessed.

Trumper is celebrated within cricket folklore for his all-round sporting acumen (he was a gifted footballer of both Australian rules and rugby and was a pioneer of rugby league in Australia), as an exemplary role model and for fundamentally changing the way the Test game was played.

If there was a designer of what has euphemistically become known as “an Australian brand of cricket”, then Trumper should rightfully be assigned the patent. 

Watch: Australia dominate Kent in Canterbury

Having made his first-class debut for New South Wales in 1894-95 – just the third season of the Sheffield Shield competition and less than 20 years after the first-ever Test – Trumper was an innovator at a time when the ink on the earliest coaching manual was barely dry.

In the days of uncovered pitches, the lean, elegant right-hander would routinely unveil strokes that no other batsman of his time had even imagined, let alone attempted.

Former England captain and noted polymath C B Fry once noted of Trumper: “He had no style, and yet he was all style.

“He had no fixed canonical method of play, he defied all orthodox rules, yet every stroke he played satisfied the ultimate criterion of style -- the minimum of effort, the maximum of effect." 

It could easily pass as a description of any modern Twenty20 batsman who has brought an array of new strokes to an old game.

The legends that surround Trumper are myriad, and as enduring as the emblematic photograph of him leaping from the crease and launching into an extravagant drive as if the cricketer had been the subject of one of da Vinci’s anatomical studies.

It remains the quintessential image of Australian cricket before the Great War.

Perhaps his most famous innings came at Old Trafford in July 1902 when he opened the batting with Reggie Duff against an England attack led by Wilfred Rhodes and Stanley (later Sir Stanley) Jackson – and at lunch on day one Trumper was not out 102.

It was the first time a Test batsman had scored a century in a session, let alone the opening one of a match.

Australia won that Test by three runs – which stood as the closest margin of an Ashes Test until Edgbaston 103 years later – and the series 2-1.

A month after that Test, the Australians played one of their 34 tour matches of their four and half-month tour of the UK at Canterbury’s St Lawrence Ground against county team Kent.

Trumper was instrumental in the tourists recording an 89-run victory in that three-day game, top-scoring for the match with 69 coming batting at number three in Australia’s second innings.

More than a hundred years later, Smith made an even more sizeable score (111 retired) batting in the same pivotal position against the county that has fallen upon lean times in recent years.

Like Trumper, Smith made his Test debut in England as a 21-year-old and seems destined for a similarly celebrated career as a player with a squeaky clean image and an unorthodox, entertaining and highly effective technique.

If his career (and his visit to Kent in 2015) is remembered with similar fondness and reverence a century later, he too will have earned a place as a genuine legend of Australian cricket.