There’s an old joke about a journalist sent to Shady Pines to discover the secret of longevity. The first pensioner he meets attributes his great age to booze — a bottle a day for 70 of the past 90 years. The second, a crone of staggering decrepitude, owes it all to cigarettes — started when she was nine, smoked three packs a day until today, where she finds herself a reeking, yellowed 100-year-old. At last he trips over Father Time himself, shrivelled to almost nothing, gibbering through toothless gums, with a hearing-trumpet in each hairy ear.
”And you, sir?” bellows the reporter. ”How did you do it?”
”Sex, my boy!” cries Methuselah, drooling maniacally. ”Lost my virginity at 16 and been going at it ever since.” And his age? ”Twenty-nine, my boy! Twenty-nine!”
It’s a joke that needs updating. Fornication may dilapidate some of its more enthusiastic practitioners, but it surely pales into languid insignificance next to the physical and mental strains of bowling fast in an environment of sustained pressure and cut-throat competition.
Shaun Pollock hasn’t yet graduated to hearing-trumpets, but his body should, at least by the reckoning of non-medical laymen, be utterly shot. Indeed, in the entire history of the game, only three seam-up bowlers have delivered more overs in international cricket, whether in Tests or one-dayers. All three men are or were freaks.
Glenn McGrath, surely now entering the last five months of his career, built a career on being a clockwork ballista, wound tight enough to be nasty but not so tight that his beams splintered.
Wasim Akram perfected a mix of high-octane ambition, pride, intrigue and hair pomade that kept his 12-cylinder engine purring for years longer than it should have. And Courtney Walsh was 400 years old when he retired.
No one can dispute the epic stamina of these three campaigners. Neither should one try to suggest that
Pollock is a greater bowler than any of them: McGrath will go into retirement unchallenged as the more penetrative seamer, and Wasim was certainly more physically threatening.
But one profound difference remains between Pollock and those ahead of him on the highway of pain: he is just 33 years old.
It would be a terrible pity if Pollock retires after the World Cup. His magnificence in the one-day arena was once again driven home this week against Sri Lanka, as he garrotted them with the ball and perforated them with the bat; but with a second child recently arrived it is increasingly unlikely that he will be able to resist the tug of home and the curious retirement urge that World Cups seem to bring on ageing players.
If he does call it a day after the West Indian tournament, his extraordinary career will shine with a new brilliance; for we will suddenly realise that Pollock did it all, better than almost everybody else, and in greater volumes than all but three — and all before his 34th birthday. If ever there was a player who used himself up in the service of pleasure and responsibility, being too involved and exuberant to keep anything in reserve for himself, it was Pollock.
Which brings one back to the earlier assumption, that the tall seamer’s body should be finished. And yet the showing against Sri Lanka — a lithe, stalking performance exemplified by his lethal fielding — was a timely reminder that ageing doesn’t equal dead, and forced one to reassess just where Pollock is in terms of his contribution to the national team.
Some commentators, including this one, have suggested that his days as a Test bowler are finished. Nothing has happened to challenge this view: the guile that experience brings is simply not a substitute for penetration. He will make an extremely watchable number six batsman and change bowler, if he decides to play on in the longer game, but for now we must concede that ”caught Boucher, bowled Pollock” will be an increasingly rare line in Test scorecards.
But one-day cricket has never been about cutting through batting line-ups, and Pollock seems to have thrown all his aggression and considerable powers of concentration into exploiting the limitations of the shorter game to the fullest. In his past 15 ODIs, going back to the VB series in Australia in January, he has conceded an average of three runs an over. Going for 30 off 10 in an individual contest can be a match-winning performance. To sustain it for almost a year is simply frightening.
This is not a statistical fluke or a run of good fortune. Pollock, one of our most intelligent bowlers ever, has changed his game plan. The flow of wickets may have slowed, but so have the runs. And all power to him, for as long as he wants to play the game.