The Last Waltz or an Irish Goodbye

PL recalls retirements past and the time Damien Martyn ghosted his team mates midway through an Ashes

From Usman Khawaja’s Instagram account

This Ashes slouches into Sydney resembling the toy the dog chewed. The Australians’ series victory in Adelaide is a memory sullied by the shitshow that followed at the MCG, and it is now over to the game we spend so much of our waking lives contemplating to deliver a reviving tonic.

If that’s not too much to ask.

Melbourne is hard to shake. While I’m not sure anyone really totally grasps what happened, we all know that whatever it was left us feeling empty and disappointed. England will take the win, but should be a little uncomfortable about its implications. A little more application in earlier matches, a little more preparation, and who knows? Maybe they’d have got into the groove before this. As Mike Atherton wrote in The Times, “England, ready to run now, have come good belatedly. That is not a cause for celebration, but for regret.” The Australians will know they weren’t at their best and fumbled a chance to keep the whitewash in play. The MCC will know that for the want of, say, a few millimetres of grass, cricket fans had their Christmas gutted. Broadcasters, caterers and Australian cricket, meanwhile, are left to count financial costs.

The Grade Cricketer’s Sam Perry observed that “everything that everyone did was shit”, and it’s hard to disagree with him.

There is, however, given the importance Australia places on the World Test Championship and the simple fact that futures are at play for some, no way we are going through the motions here.

There is, too, faith that Test cricket will dust itself off, that the players will attend more assiduously to the essentials of the five-day game, and that the game will provide.

Sydney and the last Test of the Ashes, traditionally, mark the end of cricket’s circadian cycle for players involved. Thus, the SCG has, over the years, held something of a monopoly on swansongs for the greats of the game.

Mitchell Johnson bid a hasty farewell with his immediate family on hand at the WACA, November 2015

Some bail out mid-tour or off Broadway, but most aim for the big stage, and the SCG shapes for most veterans much like San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom did for The Band on Thanksgiving Day 1976.

It’s a great film.

The first four days in Sydney are sold out.

The general public has assigned seats; the members must rouse themselves early and compete for spoils like shoppers at a Boxing Day sale. Anticipating more demand than capacity, the venue’s operators have set aside a live site at the football stadium next door.

Will they get the chance to rise and farewell Usman Khawaja? The veteran is, by nature, a contrarian. If the expectation is that he will bow out, he will be tempted to defy it, which is not to say that would be motivation enough to continue. Perhaps a little more sanguine than in his early days, Khawaja could still rage against the dimming of the day because he believes he has more to give.

He has every right, should he want, to leave his future to the selectors who would presumably make their call around contract time in the middle of the year. There are no Tests scheduled for the Australian side until later in the year.

And, who knows, maybe there’ll be others who decide enough is enough? People have been trying to second-guess what Steve Smith will do next for a few years now.

I love a good farewell.