Bell's long service takes its toll

It is not officially the end. Ian Bell himself, in a typically gracious response to his axing from England's Test squad for South Africa, vowed on Twitter that he would, first, enjoy a winter break with his family for the first time in 11 years and, then, come back next season "determined to win my place back".

And yet, while Bell takes a well-earned break after a decade on parade, the reading of his tea-leaves is unlikely to offer much comfort. For Trevor Bayliss, England's recently installed coach, to make such a big call only six months into his tenure seems a fairly devastating glimpse into the near future.

Bell will know full well that, in averaging 28.69 in eight Tests under Bayliss, he has failed to make a convincing case for his retention to the new boss. He will be 34 by the start of the Sri Lanka Test series next May and, having already telegraphed his waning hunger with a notable pause for thought at the end of last summer's Ashes, he may probably also sense that a redoubling of his efforts to regain his place will be beyond him.

England's eyes are turning to the future on all fronts, with the 2019 World Cup as much of a priority as the 2017-18 Ashes tour. Bell's time had already been called in the shorter formats, while Alastair Cook's leadership of the Test team is arguably coming into its own as his peers of the past decade are peeled away to be replaced by younger men around whom he can hone his role of elder statesman.

There is only one direction of travel at present, as Bell's management stable-mate, Kevin Pietersen, can attest, regardless of his strident support for his buddy. And yet, South Africa remains the No.1 Test team in the world. England could, and surely would, have put their squad evolution on hold if they truly believed that Bell had one last big series to come.

Statistics, like bikinis, conceal as much as they reveal, yet there is a poignant symmetry to the numbers that Bell has racked up in the course of his 11-year career. Like his long-time batting mentor, Graham Gooch, he has amassed 118 Test appearances, with 22 centuries to Gooch's 20, at an average of 42.69 that, like Gooch's own figure of 42.58, feels significantly lower than the benchmark figures of his era, but is nevertheless reflective of the fluctuations that all long-term campaigners must endure.

Bell's critics will argue that his (final?) Test average is proof that he never truly fulfilled his potential - likewise his tally of 7,727 runs which, while formidable by most standards, falls someway shy of Gooch's long-term England record of 8,900, never mind the 10,000-run benchmark towards which Cook is hurtling and which Bell, in his 2010-11 pomp, seemed certain to challenge as well.

Instead, he is parked at No. 8 on the list of England's leading run-scorers - one run adrift, in fact, of Michael Atherton, whose own runs often appeared to be an accidental by-product of his refusal to buckle. It is an easy charge to level, that stylists such as Bell lacked the substance of their less flamboyant counterparts, and like Tom Graveney and David Gower before him, history is sure to apply a "what if" to his efforts. And yet, in all three cases, their sheer longevity scotches such judgement. Weak Test cricketers do not endure beyond a handful of appearances, let alone span playing generations.

After all, Bell's appetite for towering feats of run-scoring has never been in doubt - from his maiden-hundred demolition of Bangladesh in the spring of 2005, after which he was averaging an unsustainable 297, to his career-best 235 against India at The Oval in 2011, a celebratory performance as England sealed a 4-0 whitewash and confirmed their status as the No. 1 team in the world. Less towering, but no less vital, were his three scores of 109, 109 and 113 with which England secured a 3-0 Ashes win over Australia in 2013. It ought to be recalled as his finest hour, but like the photos of a shotgun wedding, the knowledge of what happened next ensures that only a handful of masochists will ever go digging in that particular album.

Bell's greatest achievement has arguably been to live up to the promise of his youth - and that's not always a straightforward process, as the vast majority of Under-19 cricketers can confirm. The teenage precocity that earned him a rave review from Dayle Hadlee, brother of Richard, as well as an injury call-up as a 19-year-old to the 2002 Test tour of New Zealand, has been translated into a career of true substance: roles, starring and otherwise, in five Ashes series wins (as many as Ian Botham and Ricky Ponting, to name but two of the greatest), as well as 48 individual Test victories, more than any England player before him, with only his contemporaries Cook and James Anderson ahead of him on the list.

Despite all that, for some, the gorgeous memories of Bell's cover-drive in full flow will forever be tempered by the suspicion that he would go missing when the battle really was at its fiercest. It was a charge that doubtless stemmed from his rabbit-in-the-headlights experience in the greatest series of them all - the 2005 Ashes, in which Bell, then 23 but with the body language of a 12-year-old, mustered seven single-figure scores in 10 innings, including a pair in the decisive contest at The Oval.

He was retained for the duration of that contest as if on a promise - "earn this" as Captain Miller says at the culmination of Saving Private Ryan - but for some time thereafter the frazzling experience of that summer seemed to discourage him from seeking a lead role. Somewhat tellingly, it wasn't until his tenth Test century, against Bangladesh at Dhaka in March 2010, that he finally reached three figures in an innings without a team-mate getting there first. Far from dismissing that feat as a coincidence, he embraced its underlying truth. "I can't see it as being unfair," he conceded after that Dhaka innings, "because a stat is a stat".

The undoubted nadir of Bell's career had arrived a year prior to that moment of catharsis - his flimsy dismissal on the stroke of lunch in Jamaica in February 2009 was the catalyst for England's egregious 51 all out in the opening Test of the Andy Flower/Andrew Strauss era. Bell, a convenient (and some might say compliant) scapegoat, was banished to the margins, sent off to the beach to toughen up in boxing sessions with Reg Dickason, the team security advisor, while the seeds of the squad's overall revival were sown by his sturdier team-mates on the field.

And from that day onwards, there could be little quibbling with Bell's input to England's cause. He returned to the team in time to play a vital but under-appreciated part in the 2009 Ashes victory - his first-innings 72 at The Oval steadied the team's nerves after two batting failures in the fourth Test at Headingley while also banishing some of his own demons from four years earlier. And then there was his breakthrough 140 in the Boxing Day Test against South Africa, swiftly followed by a near five-hour rearguard 78 at Cape Town - two innings that confirmed that the boy wonder was finally becoming a man. And two innings that will doubtless be reflected upon in earnest in the coming weeks, when England return, six years on, to the scene of those memorable feats.

With two exceptions - a foot injury that ruled him out of the Pakistan series in 2010, and the birth of his son, Joseph (three years ago today, in fact) that caused him to miss the Mumbai Test against India in November 2012 - Bell has been a constant presence in England's middle-order in 72 matches since the summer of 2009. He has made England's fans purr on the occasions when his talent has bubbled over, and grimace in equal and opposite measure. But he has been a champion performer, a player as vital to a fine England era as Mark Waugh or Damien Martyn surely were to the great Australian teams of the 1990s and early 2000s.

Perhaps in keeping with his oddly anonymous public profile, Bell was arguably never better than on the tour when he was barely needed. The 2010-11 Ashes tour could have been his moment - he had the form, the focus, and the grizzled experience of three vastly contrasting previous series against Australia to fall back on. Instead, with Cook, Pietersen and Jonathan Trott bossing England along to three innings wins in five Tests, his solitary hundred came with the urn already secured at Sydney.

And yet, on that tempestuous opening day of the campaign in Brisbane, replete with Strauss's second-ball duck and Peter Siddle's birthday hat-trick, it was Bell, with a rearguard 76 out of 260, who stood firmer than any of his colleagues and arguably did as much as anyone to set the agenda for the series.

"It was a nice day," he said at the close, with the insouciance of a man who had seen it all before and was ready to see it again. Moments later, when asked by the baying wolves of the media whether it was time for England's fans to start panicking, Bell responded with the closest thing to a sneer that has ever passed his lips.

"Of course not," he said, and you could sense that the man whom Shane Warne had derided as the "Sherminator" on England's previous trip down under really meant it this time.

When Dale Steyn and Morne Morkel are on the rampage at Kingsmead in little over a month's time, England might yet have cause to rue the loss of such experience. Either way, you can be sure that the selectors will not have dispensed of 11 years of Test knowhow lightly - regardless of how lightly Bell himself may, at times, have worn it.