Well, I didn't see that coming! I know England are in disarray after being trounced in the first three winter Ashes clashes but for their top spinner of the last five years and one of the world's best to call it a day mid-series can only deepen the malaise in the Flower camp.
Of course, Graeme Swann has been nursing an injured elbow for a while and no doubt he had been determined to play in the Ashes defence. However, to retire as soon as the urn is known to be heading back to Australia means that either he has no fight left or that his condition is worse than we thought and he will now focus on boosting his bank balance by pushing his Big Bash and IPL credentials as a top-class spinner. At 34, he has several years on Murali!
Swann himself explained his decision by saying that he was no longer 'contributing' and he wasn't "willing to just hang on and get by being a bit-part player". True, he was having a nightmare of a series but even the best bowlers have their poor series, especially on pitches prepared for a different kind of bowling. The rest of his press conference revelaed more. Having been without question the world's best off-spinner in recent times, perhaps for decades, he felt he could no longer attain the same exceptionally high standards that caterpaulted him from journeyman county pro to international superstar within twelve months by the end of 2009. He would not be the first sporting hero to bow out at the first sign of failing form. Indeed, there are also plenty who perhaps should have taken a leaf out of Swanny's book instead of persevering for several more unproductive seasons.
It is a brave decision, too, because there is no obvious successor. For all his efforts, especially in ODIs, James Tredwell is not in the same league. The rest are either left-armers like Panesar, Briggs or Kerrigan or leggies like Scott Borthwick. Graeme Swann has few peers in current cricket anywhere, although Saeed Ajmal has outperformed the man from Northampton in the past few years, and Ravi Ashwin has also upped his game. However, in England he proved that honing your skills on the county circuit is far better preparation for top-level cricket than a few T20s. He retires with 255 Test wickets at a shade under 30 apiece accumulated in 60 matches spanning barely five years. In all first-class games his career record boasts 739 victims at 32. He is a triple Ashes winner and T20 world champion, pretty good things to have on your CV.
Let's not forget his batting and fielding either. He has almost 11,000 runs in all cricket and averages more than 25 in first-class fixtures, extremely good for someone regarded as a tail-ender. He has four centuries to his name and has contributed 1,370 valuable runs and
54 catches for England's Test side. He had a reputation for a big-mouth on and off the pitch, something that didn't endear him to me, but I couldn't deny the quality of his bowling. A deceptively orthodox rolling action which so often generated massive spin off the pitch from a gliding, almost mesmerising path through the air, many of the best batsmen in the world were deceived.
Graeme Swann leaves first-class cricket this week but this is not an obituary. It is not even a full retirement from the sport. He will continue to cause problems for batsmen in one-dayers and Twenty20s and - who knows? - more performances along the lines of the infamous Sprinkler Dance!
