An appreciation of Graeme Swann

Graeme Swann's elbow surgery has drawn attention to his importance in the English side and also set people thinking about the big Swann-sized hole in English cricket that will appear once he retires. In the Guardian, Barney Ronay pens an appreciation of a talent that is uniquely orthodox in a rapidly changing game.

A Test debutant aged 28 he has become England's defining off-spinner of the modern era, able to attack or defend, contain or destroy, to dismiss with both rip and bluff. Plus there is the paradox of his glorious orthodoxy as a bowler. Elsewhere, finger-spin has become a poutingly sexed-up business, a mille-feuille of intermingled variations, from the zinging, waddling, slingshot conjury of Saeed Ajmal to the princely, short-form poker player Sunil Narine. Swann, though, is something else, a bowler who, for all his dad-rock hipster slouch, is essentially old-fashioned, his method diligently refined over many years in county cricket.