Swann's Flight Leaves Gaping Hole in England Side

It’s becoming painfully clear that this most disastrous of Ashes tours will have ramifications far beyond the departures gate at Sydney Airport. If finding a replacement for Jonathan Trott didn’t appear difficult enough, then the shock retirement of Graeme Swann has instigated a task that must be somewhere close to impossible.

Since his test debut in 2008, gifted to him at the relatively late age of 29, the mournful strains of the Joy Division-inspired ode to Swann have echoed round cricket grounds all over the world. For the last few months, however, Swann’s off-breaks have ceased to ‘tear you apart’- instead, they have rather meekly pawed.

That said, Swann will be remembered as the best English spin bowler since Derek Underwood, the right-armer who played his last test in 1982. For years, Swann coming on and dismissing batsmen with his first ball of a spell was almost a matter of course. Just ask Gautam Gambhir, Shiv Chanderpaul and Marcus North, batsmen of the highest quality, and dismissed sixteen times by Swann between them. Left-handed players in particular will sleep a lot easier from now on.

Cricket fans my age have been blessed and cursed by our experiences of spin bowlers. We are blessed in the sense that we grew up on a diet of Muralitharan and Warne, the two best spinners to ever play the game; cursed in that every spinner’s record pales in comparison. In terms of English spinners, however, no-one can doubt the quality of Swann.

In an age of the doosra bowler, Swann was the traditional off-spinner, a regrettably dying breed. What made him so great? Put simply, it was a combination of the incredible spin that he imparted on the ball, and the nagging line that makes any bowler difficult to play. Good spinners tend to possess one of those qualities, and occasionally stumble upon the other. Swann, however, was better than good, and held both.

He will perhaps come to be seen as the epitome of the Andy Flower era. Undeniably gifted in one area of the game, Swann’s batting (an average of 22 is a healthy one for a tail-ender) and slip fielding made him a cricketer who was greater than the sum of his parts. Hard work and discipline have been the hallmarks of this team, and for so long, Swann was the flag-bearer.

Now, epitomising the shambolic nature of this Ashes tour, Swann may well become the pall-bearer. No-one can blame Swann, or even be surprised by this dip in form. It’s an argument for another time, but the ECB’s excessive schedule has caught up with some members of the squad.

Unsurprisingly, Swann does not want to carry the drinks for the remainder of his test match career. This decision to fly home should not taint his legacy, and indeed, it would seem that it will eventually be seen as just another painful facet of the tour rather than be a black mark upon Swann’s character. Perceived criticism of teammates and an unsavoury Facebook comment may prove to be viewed differently.

The brilliance of Swann, like so many legacies in sport, may only become apparent in the years to come. Nobody quite understood Andrew Flintoff’s importance as a test match number six until recently. To quote the old adage, ‘you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone’.

As if to emphasise that point, England hardly possess an embarrassment of riches in the spin department. Monty Panesar may well have two games, free of the pressure of a competitive Ashes series, to stake his claim. However, he is the anti-Swann. His laughable fielding and batting will not sit well with this particular England camp, so keen to have players of more than one discipline.

It seems now that it is a question of when, rather than if, Andy Flower leaves his post. In that event, the smart money appears to be on Ashley Giles, for so many years a steady hand on the tiller rather than a world class spinner. If he coaches in the same fashion, the conservative bent of English cricket may well look to Moeen Ali or Scott Borthwick, but Ali’s credentials in particular lie in his batting, not his bowling.

If not epitomising the Flower era, then Swann at the very least represents the cricketer we’d all like to play with on a Sunday. Fiercely competitive on the field, to the point of admonishing fielders for misfields, Swann’s jovial conduct off the field in Twitter and in interviews, until this cataclysmic tour, has softened the image of the team, with the steely Cook/Flower duo at the top.

England’s spinner, their best for thirty years, will be remembered fondly, despite the regrettable ‘swan song’.