It is interesting to hear different opinions about whether or not these are or are not Knickerbocker players or George Wright, and the back and forth as to similarities and dissimilarities of the images and other ancillary data and information to support the suppositions that these are photos of the alleged parties. At the end of the day though, there is no way to 100% prove, or disprove, either side of the argument, which is unfortunate. And human nature being what it is, there will always be someone to disagree with you, no matter what the topic or issue is.
What makes me wonder though is the way that some parties just summarily dismiss any and all thinking and logic and simply declare someone is just wrong, and that they are right, period. I am no photo or facial recognition expert, but like everyone else, have a lifetime of experience in deciding what does or doesn't look similar to me. For the alleged Knickerbocker players, there clearly are not enough contemporary photos of the parties involved to allow for a more comprehensive comparison and determination as to who the parties are in the picture. And the chances of the six gentlemen being the Knickerbocker players is extremely remote at best. And without some other irrefutable evidence and provenance to prove the photo of the six gentlemen are the alleged Knickerbocker players, aside from some perceived facial similarities, the naysayers know you'll never get consensus agreement from the "experts" and can therefore confidently claim it is not them. The issues with photo quality, questions of aging and respective age differences of the parties involved, and so on, make it literally impossible to make an absolute verification of the identities of the six individuals in the gentlemen's photo. But that goes both ways as you can't absolutely disprove that maybe one, or more, of the six gentlemen were in fact Knickerbocker players. To sway the minds of the "experts" you'd need something like a descendant of one of the alleged Knickerbocker players to suddenly come forward with a similar photo of the same six gentlemen taken during the same photo session. And have them tell how it has been in the family for generations, handed down from the relative in the photo who was in fact on the Knickerbockers, and that the further family story is that he is pictured with former teammates. You'll still find some "experts" that will vehemently deny the story and say it is false, and that the photo is not what it is then claimed to be. But a majority of "experts" would likely acquiesce and go along with the story and new found provenance, and that would colloraborate the authenticity of Steve's photo. Will that ever happen, probably not. But it could!
As for the George Wright photo, there are a lot more photos of him out there to use for comparison purposes to the one Steve has than there are for the alleged Knickerbocker players. Some have stated how there are dissimilarities between Steve's alleged photo of Wright, and the confirmed photos of him, thus proving to them that Steve's photo is not of Wright. However, forgetting Steve's photo and looking just at all the confirmed photos of Wright shown in this thread from over his years, if you didn't know the provenance and acceptance of those photos and simply had them laid out in front of you, could you honestly beyond any doubt say they were all of the same person? I honestly could not. Photo quality, age differences, angles, lighting, shadows, they all factor in to what we see, or think we see, along with the bias from being told up front that all the pictures are confirmed as George Wright.
So there is no definitive proof either way that Steve is right or wrong, and likely never will be. Just estimated probabilities on either side of the question. Good luck to Steve in additional research. You never know, sometimes miracles do happen and the "experts" are proven to be anything but.
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