Retirement is the right word, but it is not quite the right sentiment is it? Not for Shane Watson. For one thing, until the very day he ended his Test career, it felt perennially as if it was just about to begin.
Now he would open. Now he could become Australia’s No 3. Now he should reinvent himself lower down the order and become a bowling all-rounder. Would, could, should – you build hypothetical economic models on that, not a sporting career.
But retirement also does not feel right as Watson has not retired as much as given in to all the various forces that conspired during the past decade to prevent him from becoming what nearly everyone thought he would: a great Test all-rounder. Maybe that was what did it: too much expectation.
When he played his first Test, he walked into the greatest Australian line-up: Justin Langer, Matthew Hayden, Ricky Ponting, Damien Martyn, Michael Clarke, Adam Gilchrist, Shane Warne, Jason Gillespie, Glenn McGrath and Stuart MacGill (who played because it spun at Sydney).
It was patently unfair. Here was the world’s next great all-rounder, and he was Australian, and he would be playing for this Australian side? They needed him like the world needs a Donald Trump presidency. Cut the opposition some slack.
It was a low-key debut, but in hindsight, set against his career figures, it was perfectly apt: one important wicket, generally tidy bowling, and a neither-here-nor-there innings of 31.
That is not to say he ends with a bad career. Just that he could never rid the world of the sense that it was waiting for him to be something or someone else: the Next Big Thing, the next Keith Miller, the next Andrew Flintoff, the next Australia captain.
Had he played on until the next Ashes, they would have wanted him to be Australia’s Ben Stokes. Nobody remembers, on the other hand, that Watson was ascendant enough for a period for younger players to be talked about as the next Shane Watson (namely, and very briefly, Moises Henriques).
His batting was powerful though charmless, and too often it lacked some central nous or awareness, not about how to start an innings, but about how to carry it on. His powerful forearms and hands could not simply appear and impose themselves on a game anywhere in the world.
On the occasions that he did show that awareness, as when he batted through an entire day in Mohali in 2010, it was revelatory. That came in a period, between 2009 and 2011, when he got it, averaging nearly 50, all as an opener.
On the other hand, bowling often seemed a more natural expression of his gifts. With ball, even – and maybe especially – when his pace dropped, he had an intuitive grasp of what batsmen did not like facing. That is not unheard of among all-rounders, who can apply what they themselves do not like facing as batsmen more rigorously than specialist bowlers can.
Mostly he knew that keeping it arrow-straight, aiming for pads and stumps, was a strategy for most conditions. Some 39 of his 75 wickets were bowled or lbw, balls angling or curving in gently but deceptively, or cutting in off the surface. They were exactly the kind of deliveries that dismissed him so often as a batsman.
But when it swung, he could swing it. When it seamed, he could cut it. When it reversed, he could reverse it. More than anything, it is on his bowling that the cost of so many injuries should be measured. How much more of a bowler could he have been had his body not struggled so?
And, of course, there was that body, captured in all its broad, buffed musculature in that early nude calendar work. People raved about it, but from the off it looked like it was being utilised in the wrong sport.
The movements looked stiff and clunky. Power in cricket is increasingly important, but so, too, is how it is packaged. Kevin Pietersen has power, as does AB de Villiers, but leaner, more lissom frames help them use it to better effect.
The body must allow freedom in the unusual range of movements cricket demands. It is an unscientific observation, but not too many big, hulking men have become great cricketers.
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
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