Why quit when you're ahead?

UMPIRE'S POST

Older and more experienced players are an asset. Like soldiers, cricketers should go down fighting.

Even though cricket has become professionalised, its practitioners and administrators are refusing to treat it as a profession. Where else would you hear people worrying about when to retire, or the employer nudging out an experienced campaigner to infuse young blood?

The clamour around the timing of retirement has become especially shrill in the last few years. Till the 1980s and early 1990s, it wasn't unusual to see players playing in their late 30s or even early 40s. Some of them, like Imran Khan, were cajoled out of retirement to seek further glory.

One of the most remarkable stories the game has produced is of Colin Cowdrey's sixth Ashes tour in 1974-75. Battered by Lillee-Thomson, England asked Cowdrey, then well into his 42nd year, if he would help out. Australians were bewildered when the old man, in the second Test, ambled towards the crease and introduced himself to Thomson: "I don't believe we've met. My name's Cowdrey". But he played him as well as anyone else. He retired the following summer, but not before scoring 151 to lead Kent to a stunning win against the Australians at Canterbury.

Even if you leave the early years "" Wilfred Rhodes played his last Test in 1930, aged 52 years and 165 days "" the game has respected age more than most other sports, except perhaps chess. Traicos played his last Test in 1993 aged 45, Embury in 1995 aged almost 43, Gooch in 1995 aged over 41, Clive Lloyd in 1984 aged over 40, Greenidge in 1991 aged over 40, Houghton in 1997 aged over 40 and Stewart in 2003 aged over 40.

In recent years, the silly notion has set in that you have to quit at the top. So we have had a bunch of players, many of them from Australia, quitting when they still had much cricket left in them. Gilchrist, the most destructive batsman in Tests, is quitting because he missed a catch or two in the Tests against India. By that yardstick, Parthiv Patel should have quit at 18. At least Gilchrist could have continued as a batsman.

George Bernard Shaw wrote in Arms and the Man, "Soldiering is a trade like any other trade." So is cricket. Like soldiering, cricket could be a short career. The players should keep playing so long as they are better than the 12th man trying to get in. And the selectors should keep selecting the best players, not the youngest.

Sunil Gavaskar's last Test innings, a masterly 96 against Pakistan on a minefield in Bangalore, was one of his best. And Imran Khan won the World Cup after he came out of retirement.