Why compiling best of all-time teams is a fool’s errand

We’re already in the Christmas Silly Season when newspapers and now, I suppose, websites invite readers to compile lists: ten best left-handed tennis players, for example. A recent one on the BBC sports website had us select England’s best all-time football XI. Rather surprisingly the popular selections went back some way, as far anyway as England’s 1966 World Cup winning team, which supplied Gordon Banks in goal, Bobby Moore, Bobby Charlton and Jimmy Greaves who had of course been dropped by Alf Ramsay well before the final. Still there was no place for Stanley Matthews or the great, the supreme Tom Finney. Omitting Tom Finney is to my mind a bit like leaving Roger Federer out of a list of the greatest tennis-players.

Talking about these things, my son Alex remarked that he had seen an all-time Australian Test XI voted for by Aussie cricket fans which preferred Matthew Hayden to Victor Trumper as one of the opening batsmen.

Well, really… Hayden was certainly a prolific run-scorer, a powerful and punishing batsman, a slaughterer of mediocre bowling and even of good bowling on true and easy wickets. But he was an indifferent player when the ball was moving about which is probably why only one of his thirty Test Hundreds was made in England. In short he was one of the most daunting of flat-track bullies. But to prefer him to Victor Trumper is like comparing a talented winner of Strictly Come Dancing to Fred Astaire, or – a fairer comparison perhaps – picking an all-time Wales XV with Dan Biggar at fly-half rather than Barry John.

Now I confess I never saw Trumper play. There is nobody left alive who did so. He played his last Test in 1912 and died, aged only thirty-seven, three years later. It is said that 250,000 people lined the streets of Sydney for his funeral. Beat that if you can.

Of course there are many batsmen who have hit more Test centuries and scored more runs at a much higher average than Victor Trumper. Conditions have changed. Trumper played on uncovered pitches, something no modern has experienced in Test, or indeed first-class, cricket.

So what can one say? How can one judge how good he was? Well, first, almost everyone who saw him bat thought him a genius. A great English bowler – I think it was Wilfred Rhodes – said, “I put the ball where I want it, and Victor, he puts it where he wants it.” Second, twenty years after his death, when Don Bradman was in his prime and scoring his huge double and even triple centuries, many Australians who had watched them both couldn’t agree to put Victor in second place. According to an early biographer and huge admirer of Bradman, Johnnie Moyes, the idea of dethroning Victor was almost blasphemous.

When, aged nineteen, he made his first Test century, 135 not out, appropriately at Lord’s, W. G. Grace presented him with a bat inscribed “From the Present Champion to the Future Champion”. In truth W. G. was now fifty and had indeed played his last Test a fortnight previously. So he might more accurately have described himself as the Past Champion. Even so, it was a case of “The King is dead. Long live the King.”

Victor’s “annus mirabilis” was 1902. It was a wretchedly wet summer. Nevertheless he made more than 2,700 runs with eleven hundreds, delighting, indeed charming, the crowds wherever he went. The first two Tests were ruined by rain at Edgbaston. Australia were dismissed for 36, Rhodes, near unplayable on a sticky wicket, taking 7 for 17. At Old Trafford in the fourth Test, Australia batted first, Victor at number one. At lunch the score was 173 for 1, Trumper 103 not out. I think it was this match, watched by Neville Cardus (skipping school?), which provoked one of my favourite, though doubtless apocryphal, Cardus stories. The England captain, Archie McLaren was criticised for the field he had set against Victor. “Look,” he replied, “I’d a man at long-off and a man at long-on. I couldn’t put a fielder in the bloody car-park, could I?” Was there even a car-park in 1902, I wonder? No matter. The present Australian captain, Tim Paine, might have offered a similar reply to anyone who criticised his field setting at Headingley last summer when Ben Stokes was smiting the ball deep into and perhaps beyond the crowd.

There can be no doubt that Trumper was a great batsman, indeed a very great one. But he was more than that. He was also a beautiful batsman. There is beauty in all sports, or most anyway, and awareness of beauty colours one’s judgement and memories. Ken Barrington was the greatest English batsman of the 1960s, a player of rich character, determination and humour. But though he had all the shots when he put self-denial aside and chose to use them, few went into rhapsodies about the beauty of his stroke-play, as they might do about his team-mates Colin Cowdrey, Tom Graveney and Ted Dexter.

Trumper had a great contemporary, Clem Hill, whose Test figures were almost identical, but, while it would be wrong to say that Hill is forgotten, he has never been remembered in the same way as Trumper. This, doubtless, is in one way unfair. After all, it is runs in the book that count. Yet, though cricket is the statistician’s delight, there’s more to the game than the figures recorded in score-books and Wisden. From what one has heard and read Victor Trumper was the incarnation of that “more”.

Arthur Mailey was one of the game’s early masters of wrist-spin, a prodigious turner of the ball with a well-disguised googly (or bosie as they said in Australia). Once as a young man playing in a Grade match in Sydney, he outwitted Victor Trumper and bowled him with a beauty. Was he elated? Yes, of course, but briefly. He experienced something close to shame: “It felt like I had shot a dove,” he said.