Published: May 17, 2016, 02:10 PM (IST)
Edited: May 17, 2016, 02:10 PM (IST)
Despite being dropped at the end of England’s series against Pakistan in UAE in November, Ian Bell may have harboured hopes of a recall after Alex Hales’s poor series in SouthAfrica and James Taylor’s enforced exit from the game. However, when the squad for the forthcoming first Test against Sri Lanka was announced, the inclusion of James Vince as Taylor’s replacement made it clear that the selectors were looking to the future, and Bell’s England career was over. It marked the severing of the last remaining link to what was widely labelled the greatest Test series ever: there is now no player from the 2005 Ashes still active at international level. Michael Jones looks at how the players from that series fared afterwards.
And then there were none.
It had looked imminent for some time: since the end of 2012 there had only been three of them remaining. Then during the 2013-14 series whitewash Kevin Pietersen had his fallout with the England management, who briefly considered an attempt at reconciliation a year later before finally deciding against it. Michael Clarke called it a day after seeing his team relinquish the Ashes in England for the fourth time in succession, a series in which he failed to reach fifty in ten innings.
Bell’s place had been in question for some time: after making 143 against West Indies at North Sound in April 2015, he had mustered only 12 runs in his remaining four innings of the series, then failed to reach three figures in either of the summer’s series. After another mediocre return against Pakistan, the selectors finally decided he had had enough chances, and the ball from Shoaib Malik which rearranged the stumps to hand him a second innings duck in Sharjah looks set to remain his last in international cricket.
In the summer of 2005, England was captivated by cricket mania like never before, as a drama in five acts kept fans, old and new, glued to their TV screens, radios or online commentary. Twenty-five players had named parts in the action (not forgetting the cameo roles played by James Hildreth and Gary Pratt): England’s only change during the series was to bring Paul Collingwood in at the Oval after Simon Jones’s injury at Trent Bridge, while Australia replaced the injured Glenn McGrath and out-of-form Jason Gillespie with Michael Kasprowicz and Shaun Tait.
It was, perhaps, to be expected that the nucleus of the Australian team in 2005 did not last much longer: several players were clearly in the twilight of their careers, and although the series defeat was not quite the end of Australia’s period of dominance — they remained the best team in the world for some time afterwards — it could be seen as the beginning of the end. None of the players wanted to end their career on such a low note, but when they regained the urn with a whitewash in the next home series, Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath and Justin Langer all decided it was time to call it a day, while Damien Martyn had already pulled the plug part way through the series.
That the England team did not remain intact may have been more of a surprise: in hindsight, the series victory had largely been the result of a number of players hitting their peak simultaneously, and several of them fell from the peak rather quickly. Simon Jones was the only player in the series who never appeared in another Test afterwards: his career up to that point had already been blighted by injury, and the damage his ankle sustained at Trent Bridge proved terminal; subsequent comeback attempts made it to county level, but no further.
The 2006-07 tour signalled the end of three England careers, but unlike the four Australians, none of them was voluntary.
Marcus Trescothick’s illness forced him to return home before the series started, so the match against Pakistan at the Oval the previous summer — better known for the accusation that one or more visiting players had tampered with the ball, the team’s refusal to play in protest and the umpires’ insistence that in doing so they had forfeited the match — turned out to be his last.
Ashley Giles’s place in the team had been under threat from Monty Panesar; his return of 2 for 149 at Adelaide did nothing to help his cause, although his drop off Ricky Ponting, which cost 107 runs, was probably at least as damaging to his prospects of extending his England career. Panesar came into the team for the following match at Perth, and his five wickets on the first day ensured Giles did not get a look-in again.
Also at Perth, Geraint Jones broke his sequence of 51 Test innings without a duck by making two in the same match; having previously been preferred to Chris Read on the grounds of being a better batsman, the pair undermined his case somewhat and Read replaced him. Jones never played for England again, although he later represented Papua New Guinea, the country of his birth, in ICC matches, then when they were promoted to ODI status, in two games in that format. By the end of the 2006-07 series, ten of the 25 who had shaped the action 18 months earlier had already played their last Test.
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For the most part, that pattern continued: more Australians were able to end their careers on their own terms, while the majority of the England players found either their bodies or the selectors made the decision for them.
There were exceptions: of the two on the losing side who failed to last even as long as the return series, Kasprowicz was at the crease to help his team seal a two wicket win at Johannesburg, but injured his back shortly afterwards and never made it back to international level.
Gillespie’s 8 wickets at an average of 11.25 against Bangladesh the same month — along with the small matter of a double century as night-watchman — were not enough to atone for his Ashes failures, and when the return series against the old enemy came around, Stuart Clark was preferred; he retained his central contract the following year, but failed to force his way back into the team.
Tait, whose two Tests in the 2005 series were his first, only played one more, against India in 2008, before acknowledging that his body could no longer cope with the strain of a five-day match; he played on in the shorter formats, earning a surprise recall for two T20Is against India in January after a five-year absence.
Adam Gilchrist and Matthew Hayden both chose the timing of their own exits, but Ricky Ponting’s retirement was more a case of jumping before he was pushed, as he acknowledged that after a run of poor scores, he no longer merited a place in the team.
Simon Katich’s exit from the team was initially due to injury, but his continued non-selection even when fit was largely political: the enmity between him and Clarke was well known, and a dressing-room confrontation had ended with him grabbing the captain by the throat — not an action likely to improve his chances of an extended spell in the team.
Of the twelve players England used in the 2005 series, only two announced their retirements at a time when they were still actually in the team, and of those, Andrew Strauss’s decision was hardly made under ideal circumstances: England had just lost 0-2 at home to South Africa, the captain had endured a poor series with the bat and had the Pietersen row to worry about — a state of affairs which would resume when he returned to the team set-up in an administrative capacity.
Somewhat ironically, the one team member who did go out on a high was the one who had contributed least to the triumph: Collingwood made only 7 and 10 at The Oval — not much grounds, as Warne loved to remind him, for being awarded an OBE — but ended his Test career at Sydney in 2010-11 by being part of the first England team in a generation to beat Australia in their own back yard (his ODI career ended less happily, being dropped after England lost to Bangladesh in the World Cup which followed, and missing the hiding at the hands of Sri Lanka which sent them out of the tournament).
The rest formed a tale of operations, terminal losses of form and the occasional selectorial whim. Match figures of 1 for 151 at Hamilton in 2008 were enough to seal the end of Matthew Hoggard’s Test career, despite rather better performances in the previous two series; his crime may have been a level of eccentricity beyond what the establishment felt comfortable with — publishing an autobiography featuring a “paw-word”, supposedly written by his two dogs, probably did not help his cause.
Michael Vaughan’s form deserted him, and despite initially expressing an ambition to regain his place, acknowledged that it was time to go when he was bowled by his three-year-old son in the back garden.
After regaining the urn again in 2009, Andrew Flintoff’s joints and Steve Harmison’s radar — neither reliable even at the best of times — both gave up the ghost.
The benefits of Pietersen’s batting became less than the drawbacks of having to deal with his ego, so Bell became the last one left — and eventually he too found that there was a limit to the selectors’ patience.
| Player | Last Test | |||
| Opposition | Venue | Date | ||
| Simon Jones | Australia | Nottingham | August 28, 2005 | Injured |
| Michael Kasprowicz | South Africa | Johannesburg | April 4, 2006 | Injured |
| Jason Gillespie | Bangladesh | Chittagong | April 20, 2006 | Dropped |
| Marcus Trescothick | Pakistan | The Oval | August 21, 2006 | Ill |
| Damien Martyn | England | Adelaide | December 5, 2006 | Retired |
| Ashley Giles | Australia | Adelaide | December 5, 2006 | Dropped |
| Geraint Jones | Australia | Perth | December 18, 2006 | Dropped |
| Justin Langer | England | Sydney | January 5, 2007 | Retired |
| Shane Warne | England | Sydney | January 5, 2007 | Retired |
| Glenn McGrath | England | Sydney | January 5, 2007 | Retired |
| Shaun Tait | India | Perth | January 19, 2008 | Injured |
| Adam Gilchrist | India | Adelaide | January 28, 2008 | Retired |
| Matthew Hoggard | New Zealand | Hamilton | March 9, 2008 | Dropped |
| Michael Vaughan | South Africa | Birmingham | August 2, 2008 | Dropped |
| Brett Lee | South Africa | Melbourne | December 30, 2008 | Injured |
| Matthew Hayden | South Africa | Sydney | January 7, 2009 | Retired |
| Andrew Flintoff | Australia | The Oval | August 23, 2009 | Injured |
| Steve Harmison | Australia | The Oval | August 23, 2009 | Dropped |
| Simon Katich | England | Adelaide | December 7, 2010 | Injured |
| Paul Collingwood | Australia | Sydney | January 7, 2011 | Retired |
| Andrew Strauss | South Africa | Lord’s | August 20, 2012 | Retired |
| Ricky Ponting | South Africa | Perth | December 3, 2012 | Retired |
| Kevin Pietersen | Australia | Sydney | January 5, 2014 | Dropped |
| Michael Clarke | England | The Oval | August 23, 2015 | Retired |
| Ian Bell | Pakistan | Sharjah | November 5, 2015 | Dropped |
Given the number of players still active at international level who made their debuts well before 2005, it is a little surprising that there should be no players remaining from a relatively recent series.
England have one themselves: James Anderson played his first Test against South Africa in 2003, but after taking 2 for 149 in the only match he played in the series triumph in the same country in 2004-05, he was overlooked for the following summer’s series.
The last Australian still active from the era was Shane Watson, who played in the ODI tri-series in 2005 (although his on-field performance in the tournament is remembered less than his insistence on moving to a different room after being scared by reports of a ghost haunting the team hotel) but not the Tests.
With Watson’s recent retirement, Australia’s longest-serving active player — barring another surprise recall for Tait — is Peter Siddle, who made his Test debut in 2008.
At the same time, although their numbers have dwindled with a succession of retirements over the last few years, there remain several players active in one or more international formats who made their debuts in the 1990s: Shahid Afridi (1996), Harbhajan Singh (1998), Ashish Nehra, Chris Gayle, Rangana Herath, Shoaib Malik and Tillakaratne Dilshan (all 1999).
Plenty more remain from the following few years: in contrast to the “greatest” series, the preceding series in South Africa featured three players still active — Anderson for the visitors, and AB de Villiers and Dale Steyn, who both made their debuts for the home team in the first match of the series.
The two thrashings inflicted on Bangladesh in the early part of the summer included the Test debut of Mushfiqur Rahim — still playing for his country in all three formats of the game — and Mashrafe Mortaza, whose appearances are now restricted to limited overs.
Slightly over ten years is an unusually short time for all the players in a series to end their Test careers: the other series of the 21st century to receive the tag of “greatest” at the time, India’s comeback win over Australia in 2001, is a marked contrast.
The core of the Australian team was the same as that in 2005, and Ponting was the last visiting player still active, more than 11 years after its conclusion, but no fewer than five Indians continued longer after the series than any player from 2005: Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman both called and end their careers a few months before Ponting, Sachin Tendulkar finished in 2013, Zaheer Khan the following year — and Harbhajan, after being dropped in 2011 then again in 2013, has played all three formats in the last year, albeit without being an automatic choice in any of them; whether or not he will play again is anyone’s guess.
A glance over great series of previous eras reveals at least one player from most who continued for well over a decade afterwards. Among those who played in “Botham’s Ashes” in 1981, the eponymous hero himself continued until the home series against Pakistan in 1992, but was outlasted by Graham Gooch and Mike Gatting from his own side (both of whom brought their careers to a close in the 1994-95 Ashes), as well as Allan Border (Australia’s first post-readmission tour of South Africa, 1993-94) among the opposition.
From the classic Australia vs West Indies duel in 1960-61 which started with the first tied Test and featured another two nail-biters later in the series, Garry Sobers continued until 1974, and three years later still Bob Simpson came out of retirement to lead an Australian team depleted by its leading players’ preference for the greater financial rewards offered by World Series Cricket.
Neil Harvey was still a teenager at the time of the 1948 Invincibles tour, and played on for almost fifteen years after it (the England player who continued longest from the same series was Godfrey Evans, who played his last Test in 1959, a few months after Jim Laker).
Another Ashes classic, that of 1902, is something of an anomaly as far as this yardstick is concerned — because it happened to fall early in the career of Wilfred Rhodes, who was called up again for his last Test series almost 28 years later.
Even series which came shortly before interruptions to the scheduling of Tests often had players continue longer than any from the 2005 clash managed: most of those immediately before the First World War featured one or more of Rhodes, Jack Hobbs, Frank Woolley, Herbie Taylor, Mick Commaille, Warren Bardsley and Charlie Macartney, all of whom carried on playing well after the resumption of international matches, while among players who made their debuts before the Second, Denis Compton, Len Hutton, Freddie Brown, George Headley, Lindsay Hassett and Lala Amarnath did likewise.
From South Africa’s last series before isolation, Ian Chappell played his last Test in 1980, Doug Walters 1981 — then, after no player from that series had featured in a Test for more than a decade, John Traicos reappeared for Zimbabwe. South Africa’s previous series, three years earlier and also at home against Australia, did not feature Traicos but did include Chappell.
The 2005 Ashes appears, then, to be a rarity in seeing all its participants exit Test cricket in barely a decade. What can we conclude from this? Australia, as widely acknowledged at the time, were a great team reaching the end of their period of greatness. England, although their series triumph appeared to herald the start of one, never achieved it — as over the following years almost every member of the team found either that his form went to pieces, or his body did likewise.
(Michael Jones’s writing focuses on cricket history and statistics, with occasional forays into the contemporary game)
