Paradise lost

If word got around that Michael Slater was about to walk out to bat for the last time in his life - more a gallop than a walk really, so anxious was he to impose himself on a game - you would do just about anything you could to be there. You'd scale barbed wire, jump a plane, cease work for the day. With Slater, almost uniquely among this modern Australian side, cricket never seemed much like work.

It might mean a lot of effort for little reward. Sometimes he'd hazard a woolly lash at the second ball of an innings and edge to slip, just like he did in Delhi in 1996 when Australia first dumped him. Or maybe he'd try a fraction too zealously to king-hit Darren Gough into the nearest hot-dog stand, the same way he did at Headingley in 2001, when he was elbowed out for the second and last time. You never knew with Slater, just like you never knew with Trumper or Macartney or Walters or Hookes, which is part of the reason we liked them too.

And now we will never get the chance. At the SCG today, Michael Jonathon Slater announced that his ongoing battle with ankylosing spondylitis, a form of arthritis, means he can no longer realistically hope to continue playing cricket.

The setting was appropriate. The SCG, traditional venue for the last five days of an Australian summer, has hosted more than its share of happy and sad farewells to the game's giants. But everything else seemed awry. A batsman quick of foot and sharp of wit, who had always seemed so shimmering and vivacious and irrepressibly young, had conceded defeat to what is commonly considered an old-timer's disease.

"The decision has been a painful one," he read aloud to the small gathering. "It's been a very tough one, given that I still have the desire to play and believe I still had a lot to offer New South Wales cricket. But I feel to have signed with the Blues in the hope of being fit for the season would have been irresponsible."

Being irresponsible had never - thankfully, charmingly, refreshingly - worried Slater too much till now. They were a couple of seconds thick with irony.

At this same stadium five years ago, against England, Slater dashed off what some consider his supreme masterpiece. With what Wisden called "a starburst of boundaries", he slashed and scythed and heaved 123 of Australia's 184 all out, winning a Test and wowing Steve Waugh, who still rates it the mightiest innings he's witnessed by an Australian at the ground.

And now, a rainbow of classic Slater moments come jostling for space in the memory banks. There he is at Lord's in 1993, kissing the Australian coat of arms and unfurling 18 fours on the first day - most of them pristine straight-drives - like some late-20th century CB Fry. Two Slater hundreds, it is too-soon-forgotten, were forged in the grime and dust of Rawalpindi, where the going is seldom easy.

His truest believers remember him for upper-cutting Phil De Freitas's first ball of the 1994-95 Ashes series to the third-man fence. Before the over was over, he'd done it again. "The first over of a Test is usually like Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture ," noted John Harms, who writes a bit like Slater used to bat and was drinking beer on the Gabba hill that morning. "On this occasion it was more like If You're Happy And You Know It Clap Your Hands ."

Invariably these knocks were crucial. Ten of Slater's 14 Test hundreds were struck in the opening two Tests of a series, when everything is there to play for.

But he did more than invigorate a team; he transformed an art. Before Slater, opening the batting for Australia had become a grouchy business of seeing off rather than taking on the new ball. You had to trawl through Taylor, Boon, Marsh, Kerr, Hilditch, Wood, Wessels, Dyson, Laird, McCosker, Turner, Redpath and a smattering of short-lived others before arriving at Keith Stackpole - the last world-class, unfailingly audacious Australian opener. It had been a long time between swashbucklers. Today's buccaneering ways of Matthew Hayden and Justin Langer owe a substantial debt to Slater.

It seemed fitting when Slater, wild and untameable, was ultimately succeeded by Langer, straight-laced and dedicated. We assumed it was just a slap on the wrists, that he'd lose his petulance and find his potency and be back in two shakes. It never happened. Hayden and Langer made themselves indisposable and we forgot about Slater with what now seems like indecent haste. It must have dejected him sometimes, for he always seemed at his happiest with the fans and the cameras and all the hoopla that follows this Australian XI wherever they go.

And he never did quite rediscover his glorious best, or only intermittently. He made 100 at the Gabba in the low-scoring Pura Cup final of 2002-03. By all accounts it was an epic, mature, majestic innings. It shaped as a new beginning. Instead it was nearly the end. He played only three more first-class matches in his life. Never again did he pass 50.

So now, aside from those 14 Test tons and nine 90s, we have a whole lot else to remember Slater by: a flash of red Ferraris, a blur of blues with photographers and journalists and occasionally opponents. But those images are fading already. Try hard and you can see him now, hurling himself into yet another cover-drive, grunting upon impact, a cocky smile on his face, those red-and-white checkered wristbands laughing at the bowler.

The only pity is we didn't get the chance to say thank you, and goodbye.