Started Masters of Cricket and it had this great paragraph right at the beginning I thought I'd share:
I never saw Trumper bat; I was only a few years old when he died. But so often have I listened to stories of him, so often have I seen a new light come into the eyes of people at the mention of his name, so much have I read of him, that I am prepared to believe that nobody, before or since, ever achieved the standards of batsmanship set by Trumper. Sir Pelham Warner, Warren Bardsley, Vernon Ransford and others saw all the great moderns and near-moderns – Bradman, Ponsford, Hobbs, Hammond, Hutton, Compton, McCabe and the like – yet there was more than loyalty to their own generation when they cast their minds back over the years and said, ‘There will never be another like Vic.’
Many players, it is true, made more runs; but runs can never be accepted as the true indication of a player’s greatness. A fighting innings of thirty or so under difficult conditions is lost in cold statistics, yet its merits far outweigh many staid (and unnecessary) centuries that are recorded for all time. The longer I live, I am pleased to say, the less nationalistic I become. The outcome of a match is interesting but not, on the scales of time, of any great moment. What IS important is whether a particular contest gives to posterity a challenge that is accepted and won, or yields in classical technique an innings or a bowling effort that makes the game richer, so that the devotee can say years afterwards, with joy in his voice, ‘I saw that performance.’