Glenn McGrath: The sting in the tail

Most natural disasters are low-key by comparison with the retirement of Shane Warne, but Glenn McGrath’s post-practice press conference to announce the end of a career so splendoured seemed extraordinarily subdued, like the Rolling Stones being reduced for their farewell gig to playing covers in a pub. In his keenly observed account, my colleague Andrew Miller describes it as ‘strangely fitting’, McGrath being a cricketer without affectations or flourishes, and he may well be right. Yet it was also another confirmation of the Warne phenomenon which, like a fire exhausting all the oxygen in the room, somehow manages to leave little over for colleagues – even one as marvellous as McGrath. The humourist Beachcomber (J. B. Morton) famously defined ‘bombshell’ as ‘the omission of a cricketer from a team’. Much of cricket season also overlapping with ‘silly season’ in news and current affairs, Warne's valediction has much the same effect.

It’s not that long since I watched McGrath use the Lord’s slope to rout England in the last Ashes series. An electron microscope could not have submitted the batsmen’s techniques to closer examination. Yet, since that Test, his figures have been 47 wickets at 28.14: respectable, but a falling off from his stellar standards. At times this summer he has genuinely laboured. At Adelaide he was comfortably the least of the Australian bowlers, denouncing the pitch as ‘ridiculous’, even though others made an impact where he did not. There is an argument, moreover, that Stuart Clark might be more effective still with unquestioned custody of the new ball, which he used adeptly in South Africa. Which raises the question: how effective would McGrath be without it?

In all, though, what a wonderful bowler. And, from everything I have observed of him off the field, what a decent man. About seven years ago, Wisden Australia, of which I was then editor, anointed him International Cricketer of the Year, and hosted him at a lunch in Brisbane. Quite prepared to take an altogether unreasonable dislike to him, I found McGrath improbably but naturally modest, and extremely perceptive about cricket in general, rather than simply about 'putting it in the right areas' and 'bowling in the corridor'. Funny, too: even now, nobody gives a more drolly self-deprecating press conference.

Oddly, perhaps, I’d also like to salute his batting. The sight of McGrath with a bat used to be as incongruous as an obese smoker in lycra: the impedimenta just seemed completely superfluous. But he worked his way to being a capable tailender – probably as good a number 11 as any in the world - and that old reputation became a subtle advantage. If McGrath kept a fielding team waiting even a few overs for his wicket, you could sense the irritation and frustration intensifying. ‘Can’t get McGrath out? Wassamatter with ya?’ In last year’s Boxing Day Test, he drove South Africa to distraction, keeping Michael Hussey company from 50 to a brilliant 100. Having started his career as Australia’s batting postscript, he became the sting in its tail.