Swann's Swansong : Hit-wicket or Caught Behind?

As if losing the Ashes in the first three games to Australia was not enough, England have now another issue to deal with: Graeme Swann’s sudden ‘retirement’ from Test Cricket, midway through the series! With this retirement, Swann joins the weird list of England cricketers who have left an Ashes series midway. While Jonathon Trott left after the first Test match defeat due to a stress related illness, Marcus Trescothick flew home during the Ashes 2006 due to a similar problem.
Swann was once hailed by experts as potentially England’s best spinner with an impressive tally of 255 wickets from 60 test games. However, the 34 year old had a dismal series at best with just 7 wickets in three games while conceding a whopping 560 runs. He struggled many times to adapt to the bouncy Australian pitches.

While addressing a press conference in Melbourne he said, “It’s quite simple. When I came out on this trip I half expected it to be my last tour for England. But with the Ashes gone now in those three test matches ... I think to selfishly play just to experience another Boxing Day test match, a Sydney test match, would be wrong ... wrong for the team ... wrong for me. My body doesn’t like playing five-day cricket anymore and I don’t feel like I can justify my spot in the team in the last stages of a game”

Interestingly, in an unexpected turn of events, Graeme Swann’s granny has blamed a “nasty” Australian team for her grandson’s retirement. Mina Swann told The Journal that she was saddened by her grandson’s retirement from cricket and believed that something “nasty” happened. She was actually referring to a particular player from the Australian cricket team but Swann actually went and spoke against what seemed liked a member of his own team.

“There is something gone wrong there and I blame the Australian players. Not all the Australian players, a certain one," she said. "When the team went down to Australia and that young lad came back, there was something going wrong then. I do not think they have been made very welcome, the team. He is not easily upset, there is something nasty happened."

On the contrary, Graeme Swann had blasted what looked like certain members of the English squad. He had said: “Some people playing the game at the moment have no idea how far up their own backsides they are. It will bite them one day and when it does I hope they look back and are embarrassed about how they carried on.”

Former England captain Michael Vaughan replied to Swann’s tweet asking “Which ones exactly?”, assuming that he was referring to English players. However, Swann denied that he was referring to any English player. But Derek Pringle, a journalist now and a former Test player said that he was obviously hinting at someone from within the team. Pringle said Swann "refused to name the guilty players but it is well-known he and Kevin Pietersen do not send each other Christmas cards.

Apparently, Swann got irritated by the fact that his fellow players or rather ‘player’ did not respect the game enough. In his autobiography ‘The Breaks are Off’, which was published two years ago, he had doubted Kevin Pietersen’s credentials as a captain. That is where the plot thickens.

All these incidents raise a lot of eyebrows and unanswered questions but the biggest question still remains: “Are England players under such kind of duress that they’d take such drastic steps?” The ECB should take notice of this alarming trend and do something about it.