It has been forty-five months since their incumbent Team Director Andrew Strauss bid adieu to international cricket. And his exit originated a procession of England retirees over this period – just eclipsing three and a half years.
His leave left a hole so deep that despite after so long, his team seems to be sighing for the services of a specialist opener matching his and captain Alastair Cook’s quality. Engaging in exactly a hundred Tests for England – half as captain – Strauss gave up his place in the Test team on enduring a winless three-Test campaign at home to South Africa.
An opener of the more classical approach, much like Cook, the stability provided by him and his partner at the top of the order was more reliable than other opening pairs prevalent at the time, notably the Australian duo of David Warner and Ed Cowan or South Africa’s Graeme Smith and Alviro Peterson.
Though that was the only farewell that England had to conduct in 2012, the following four years – nearly – brought along with them a group who would quickly jump to conclusions on careers well spent in the England jersey.
The first to follow was the pleasant off-spinner Graeme Swann, whether renowned more for his merry laughter or a cluster of wickets in his opening over of a game, difficult to tell. But Swann was what he was – a subtle tweaker and a handy hitter down the order, with sharp slip fielding abilities.
A haul of 255 wickets in 60 games over only five years of Test cricket from 2008 meant his contemporary Monty Panesar, who debuted two years earlier, has played merely half a century games, the last of which immediately succeeding Swann’s final outing during the Ashes of 2013-14 in Australia.
Much like his off-field behaviour was comical, the eloquent Swann pulled out a surprise from his bag of tricks after England surrendered the urn in Perth, thereby calling it quits.
Swann excelled – it is harsh to say that he just survived – in an era which slowly saw the emergence of young spinners mesmerized more towards the mystery deliveries rather than the conventional ones. The doosra was the only weapon he consumed when he planned a change for the batsmen, and never tried a flipper or carrom ball to deceive them.
Though he always played the game with a fine smile, Swann devoted all his seriousness in trying to bowl England to victory.
And just two Tests after Swann left, it was the unpredictable treatment of the adventurous Kevin Pietersen that resulted in another departure from the blanked English dressing room.
New ECB managing director Paul Downton dumped Pietersen on account of rebuilding the demoralised squad which got thrashed 5-0 in Australia, as the board sought to recover from the jolt sans the controversial right-hander.
Pietersen’s formula of an aggressive attitude right since the inception of his innings, something missing from the English team during his days, only seems to be replicated now by the young brigade of Ben Stokes and Jos Buttler. Though Pietersen has not officially retired yet – he plans a South Africa career too, the land where he was born – it is no mystery that he will never return.
He can never add to his 277 international caps, at least not for England. In England’s only world cup-winning campaign, the ICC World T20 in 2010, Pietersen was declared the Man of the Tournament for his heroics at number three. Two years on from his planned departure, Pietersen bides his time contesting in T20 leagues around the world.
One year later, in May 2015, when the Test regulars prepared for a hectic journey across the summer, middle-order bat Jonathan Trott came back into the England reckoning following a one and a half year hiatus from the game due to stress-related illness.
With only one fifty-plus score in six innings as an opener in the West Indies, excessive pressure from the media back home prompted Trott to resign out of poor form, and thus, retire. Only six years was how long his career lasted.
Most of his one-day career was spent in accusations that he was too slow a player for modern limited-overs cricket, but they ignored his consistency in the format – just like in Tests – as a time came when he became one of only two contemporary batsmen to average in excess of 50 in both formats.
All this and another month had barely passed before twin announcements of quitting awaited England fans – both by wicket keepers. Craig Kieswetter declared his smacked eye socket and nose and during the preceding English season would never allow him to play his favourite game again.
Like Strauss, Pietersen and Trott, he preferred England to his country of birth. Man of the Match in the final of the ICC World T20 2010, Kieswetter ended his England career on 46 ODIs and 25 T20s.
Hardly a week after he qualified for the senior England team – there existed eligibility criteria of age 22 then – Kieswetter represented England in an ODI in Bangladesh. For a while, he seemed to be the then coach Andy Flower’s right call for top order bashing and also got a hundred in his third ODI in the England shirt.
Only days later, it was the turn of the other gloveman, the gallant Sussex wicket keeper-batsman Matt Prior who succumbed to an Achilles injury which he got operated upon after the Lord’s Test against India last year.
He said, after what proved to be his final outing in international colours that he was out on a “break” from cricket; and while he walked back to the pavilion on his last dismissal, former opener Michael Atherton was not reluctant in stating that he feared it was “the end of a very good England career”.
Prior’s job was often to accelerate right from when he took guard – he did that both as opener as well as a middle order bat – and was somewhat England’s answer to the world after Adam Gilchrist, the most successful wicket-keeper batsman of the modern era, retired in 2008.
And despite all his attacking instincts, his last international century remains the most memorable – he bailed England out of jail with little support from number eleven Panesar against New Zealand in Wellington in 2013.
Besides accumulating more than 5,000 runs across formats, Prior snatched 256 dismissals behind the stumps in Tests, behind only Alan Knott for his country. Three Ashes victories and a rise to the number one position with the England team remain great achievements for Prior.
Replacements for them all had been found and England looked a settled unit despite their inconsistent run stretching throughout 2015 and spilling into the New Year as well. The likes of Cook, Joe Root, James Anderson and Stuart Broad dictated terms in victories both home and away; Stokes and Steven Finn chipped in with crucial additions to add to the efforts of the quartet.
But only days after England were runners-up in the World T20 in India, emerged news that rocked the cricket world – the squib James Taylor was driven to further vacate a spot in the middle order. A sporadic heart disease – ARVC (arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy) – cunningly killed Taylor’s dreams of gaining great success as an aspiring crucial member of the England set up.
Quiet contributions from the bat as well as at the vital silly point position in South Africa in 2015-16 kept him in the shadows of the more mesmerising Root and Stokes, though he got to play only 5 more Tests four years after bursting onto the Test scene.
Taylor retired at 26, two years younger to Trott while the latter first represented England in Tests and one to his first captain Strauss, leaving behind him merely 27 ODIs and 7 Tests of experience at the international level.
When England recalled him into the eleven for the first time since 2012, Taylor answered the call by collecting a patient 76 on a spin-friendly Sharjah wicket against the subtle Pakistan spinners in 2015; in England’s very next Test – on a more lively Durban deck late that year – South Africa’s fearsome pace attack could do little to stop Taylor from hitting a crucial 70 in the first innings.
His only ODI hundred came against Australia at Old Trafford in 2015, where a 101 lay the foundation for an England comeback into the five-match series, while he was denied triple figures in an ODI playing the same opposition in Melbourne earlier in the year in the 2015 World Cup, where a debatable decision meant Taylor was left unbeaten on 98.
His abilities were recognised at a raw age when he was awarded the Cricket Writers’ Club Young Player of the Year award in 2009 while still not twenty. His county Nottinghamshire honoured him with the captaincy in limited-overs cricket not long ago in 2014, while he was also England’s ODI captain against Ireland in a washed-out game when regular skipper Eoin Morgan was on leave.
It was Taylor who was chosen to act as skipper when Morgan had fallen victim to Mitchell Starc’s bouncer at the same venue where Taylor’s solitary international century came – it was two matches later, though.
Possible replacements
Competition for filling up this one slot in the whites, however, remains healthy. Ian Bell, the only surviving winner of the 2005 Ashes to have represented England up to 2015, will fancy his chances of regaining the selectors’ attention, as Gary Ballance misses out on an opportunity to try and squeeze back into an inexperienced England line-up.
Bell has already got a 174 for Warwickshire against Hampshire even though, two pre-season hundreds – one against Lancashire in a two-day friendly in Dubai and another in a first-class match versus MCC in Abu Dhabi – has kicked off the summer well for the left-handed Ballance, with seven awaiting Tests in the home season against Sri Lanka and Pakistan combined.
Somebody or the other out of the above seven retired – one opener and spinner each, three middle order batsmen and two wicketkeepers – as soon as England seemed relaxed on a perfect combination.
But an interesting choice will be that of the opening batsman at Headingley against Sri Lanka, the first Test of the home summer. Cook, the leader, will surely be there, but not only will the hosts require Taylor’s replacement, but also someone responsible enough to step into their former colleague Strauss’ shoes.
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