“April is the cruellest month,” said T.S. Eliot in his masterpiece The Wasteland. The next line explains the hard-heartedness – it’s the month when opposites meet "mixing memory and desire”. If Eliot were an Indian cricketer, he would have said: “Age 36 is the cruellest year because loud urgings to retire come mixed with your own desire to continue playing for another match, another season…”
“Farewell” is not a word that comes easily to the lips of any professional sportsman. Since the stakes are higher in cricket, the goodbyes are proportionately more prolonged. In the history of the game in India, Vijay Merchant is the pioneer of graceful retirement. He also gave us that immortal albeit unoriginal line: “Retire when people ask why and not when they say why not.” (English cricketer Patsy Hendren said it first.) And remember, Merchant chose to retire after scoring a century against England.
Unfortunately, the pioneer has had few followers. With exceptions like the peerless Sunil Gavaskar, most cricketers stay put mulishly till the whispers urging retirement rise to a deafening crescendo. Take Sachin Tendulkar, for instance. Without a doubt, he was the God of cricket. But even gods succumb to the acquisitive streak.
When India won the World Cup in 2011, many thought the master blaster would use the platform to grandly announce his retirement. There he stood on the pinnacle after the fabulous victory at the Wankhede. When he looked up, there was nothing between him and the gods. But Sachin squandered the moment and waited two years before he got to another handy milestone - his 200th Test at his home ground. The optics conveyed was that this was the milestone the master had been waiting for all along.
Bowling being more physically taxing than swinging a bat, many a bowlers’ decision to retire is prompted by the arms and back rather than by the head or heart. Bowlers read the writing on the sightscreen. But there have been exceptions. Kapil Dev, one of our greatest, apparently needed across-the-table persuasion by the selectors and the manager. Everyone finally agreed to wait until the next available milestone – when Kapil Dev broke Richard Hadlee’s record of Test wickets. The moment the wicket fell, the watching millions at the stadium in Ahmedabad and on TV broke into applause. How much they clapped to celebrate Kapil Dev’s record-breaking effort and how much to herald his retirement, no one will ever know.
At the other end of the scale is Ravichandran Ashwin. His end was sudden, like one of his better off-breaks. His farewell speech was well-scripted but his father (who was admittedly not PR trained) spilled the beans, saying his son had been humiliated. Well, it cannot have been undue humiliation, for Ashwin is already 38.
One of the reasons why the last act of cricketers is long-drawn and filled with embarrassing interludes is that there is not, and indeed there cannot, be a universally agreed retirement age. Inconvenient examples abound of players delivering the goods quite late in their career. At 40, the GOAT Don Bradman led ‘The Invincibles’ on a successful tour of England. He was a decade younger than Wilfred Rhodes who played till he was 50. Many cricketers of less calibre than Rhodes, not to mention the Don, delude themselves into thinking that they are contributing significantly to the team although no evidence is visible.
Right now, two Indian greats are in the crosshairs - Virat Kohli and captain Rohit Sharma. Will they, won’ they? Both are hanging on by their fingernails and have shown great resilience - more resilience in fact, than they have displayed at the crease in recent times. Well, Virat Kohli is now 36 and Rohit Sharma is 37. As we said before, 36 is a cruel age.
