Goodbye Mr Clinical

You wait ages for a bogeyman’s retirement, then two come along at once. Glenn McGrath is to join Shane Warne in bowing out after these next two Tests. The most prolific fast bowler of all will walk off arm in arm with the most prolific spinner. McGrath may even find that one of his whitewash predictions has finally come true. That would be a hell of a last hurrah, or as he presumably has it, hurrath.

The limelight at the MCG and the SCG will be unprecedentedly bright, turned up by the sentimentality we sports fans are prone to. Sharing it will suit McGrath more than Warne. Warne is a showman, a conjuror and an innovator, whereas McGrath is none of these. He is more of a surgeon - except that surgeons are supposed to make you better.

At his peak, he didn’t so much bowl teams out as disembowel them. He had a particular taste for English and West Indian flesh. The five men he dismissed ten times or more in Tests were Mike Atherton (a ridiculous 19), Brian Lara (a formidable 15), Jimmy Adams, Sherwin Campbell and Alec Stewart. He defeated them not by being clever, although he was, but by being patient, skilful, confident, and exerting immense control. Warne has expanded the possibilities of bowling; McGrath preferred to narrow them down.

His deities were the eternal verities, line, length, lift, and an upright seam. He showed that you don’t need very much movement to catch the edge. He sometimes moved the ball extravagantly, but those deliveries didn’t tend to be the lethal ones. The bulk of his wickets were taken by standard deliveries, aimed at the top of off stump, and doing just enough. He was both a great attacking bowler and a great run-saver, and the reason was that his stock ball was also his danger ball. Along with Richard Hadlee, he was the most clinical of all the top bowlers.

He made a very good Australian team almost unbeatable. Since the start of the 1997 Ashes, they have played 94 Tests with McGrath there, winning 66 and losing only 12. Without him, they have played 25 Tests, winning 15 and losing eight, so when he has been absent injured or tending his sick wife, the win ratio slips from 70 per cent to 60, but more strikingly, the loss ratio leaps from 13 per cent to 32. And the number of draws halves, because even when things were going against his team, McGrath would slow their opponents down.

He is going at the right time from his point of view. There have been intimations of mortality in this series. His six-for at Brisbane was gained mainly on reputation, as England wilted, and since then he has been just a supporting player, taking tidy two-fors. Kevin Pietersen has shown that you can dance down the wicket to him because you know where the ball will land, and McGrath has not taken that indignity well.

From the team’s point of view, the timing is not so hot. Australia famously suffered when Dennis Lillee, Rod Marsh and Greg Chappell all departed together. This is at least as great a loss, because rather than being spread through the team, it’s half the attack going at once, and more than half the threat. Ricky Ponting’s armoury won’t be empty, but it will be normal.

Who will lead the pack now? With Brett Lee going through another of his blunt patches, Stuart Clark is the only bowler who can be sure of a place in Australia’s next Test series, fitness permitting. The new chairman of selectors, Andrew Hilditch, has taken a stern line over Stuart MacGill’s behaviour issues (you wonder what he makes of Warne’s dissent). The next Aussie Test attack could be Clark, Mitchell Johnson, Shaun Tait and Dan Cullen, with Andrew Symonds or Shane Watson in support. Promising, intriguing, but not daunting. Indian fans, whose team go to Australia next Christmas, can raise their hopes a notch.