Jacques of all trades, master of all

With Jacques Kallis' retirement, the last of contemporary cricket's gentlemen players has made his exit

When Pat Cummins celebrated his 21st birthday in May this year, his teammate in the Kolkata Knight Riders squad, Jacques Kallis, tweeted his congratulations to one of the youngest Australians to have played Test cricket. Then, like all cricketers on the wrong side of 30, the 38-year-old Kallis added, "O to be young again". The wistful statement of the South African is entirely understandable. Not the lack of technique and certainly not the absence of enthusiasm, but age, and only age, could have ended a career that created Kallis' identity as a gentleman cricketer.

On July 30, Kallis announced that he would not hang around to see if he makes it to the South African one-day team for the 2015 ICC World Cup. This was a hope he had nurtured after retiring from Test cricket in December 2013. Like all cricketers, he felt he could go on for a few more years. But unlike most of them, he also was pragmatic enough to accept it when he ran out of gas. When to call it a day is a fraught issue for players, especially those who have won the right to believe they are indispensable to their teams. From Javed Miandad and Sourav Ganguly to Ricky Ponting and Sachin Tendulkar, the stars have erred in finding the right moment to announce their retirements. Not Kallis. He gauged his own performances and realised last year that "I just feel that the time is right to hang up my Test whites" and last week that "I just knew on the tour [to Sri Lanka] that I was done".

But then Kallis has always been a practical man on the field. From the time he was a 20-year-old debutant against England in 1995, the all-rounder with a 6 ft 2 inch frame amply filled with adipose and flesh misled both rivals and fans into thinking of him as someone who wouldn't win a school quiz contest, far less outthink his opponents. But over the years, Kallis proved that while he might not have a philosopher's brain, he fully understood cricket's science, art and craft.

Even Tendulkar, who ended his innings with a lifetime Test average of 53.79 (15,921 runs in 200 matches), would envy Kallis his average of 55.37 because, while in numerical terms it might be only a notch above him, the Indian maestro would accept that the South African scored the runs even as he took a bagful of wickets bowling his right-arm fast-medium deliveries. And despite the double burden that he carried, Kallis lies second among the triumvirate of most century scorers in Tests with 45 against the 51 of Tendulkar and 41 of Ricky Ponting (13,378 runs in 168 matches). Many experts rank him the best all-rounder in history, above Sir Gary Sobers of West Indies who scored 8,032 runs and took 235 wickets. On his part, Kallis collected 13,289 runs and 292 wickets in 166 matches, leaving Kapil Dev (5,245 runs and 434 wickets) and Ian Botham (5,200 runs and 383 wickets) quite some laps behind.

The South African had the solidity of defence that proved a bulwark against everything that the opposition threw at South Africa. Half of his 45 Test centuries came in victory pushes for South Africa. His lugubrious body language belied the speed he could impart to his deliveries or the reflexes that made him one of the best slip catchers in the game (200 catches in Tests). This percentage use of his strengths made him an equally respected player in the shorter formats of the game, even if he never was an overtly attacking batsman.

These statistical glories would surprise many. For, Kallis never appeared to be the superstar that he actually was. He preferred a low profile, was a thorough gentleman and never courted controversy. The only time his personal life became a topic of discussion was when he underwent a hair transplant in 2010 and reached India with a newly bushy crown, leaving even the dour Rahul Dravid to smile that "change was in the hair". With Kallis' going, perhaps the last of the gentlemen players of contemporary cricket has made an exit.