2 minute read
This is the way careers are supposed to end: messily and unsatisfactorily. No wicket with your final ball and six with your final shot. No nonsense exhibition match seemingly played solely for your benefit. Tim Southee has a chance here to lessen the grief for his team-mates and countryfolk by making it abundantly clear that, yes, it definitely is time for a new opening bowler.
Tim Southee will play his final Test match this week. Unless New Zealand drop him – which would be quite the finish.
His departure was flagged before the series even began. We always think this is a bizarre move, sentencing the player to a weird and protacted zombie netherland where they are simultaneously still playing but also finished.
Many in New Zealand have taken issue with the move, turning on Southee for effectively booking himself in for three matches for which he hasn’t necessarily had to justify his worth. We can’t know which party opened negotiations though. Perhaps coach and selectors have forced their own hands here.
Should Southee have read the room and fallen on his sword midway through the series? For all we know, he doesn’t really think it’s time for retirement at all. Anyone who’s played Test cricket for 16 years knows that form waxes and wanes. After 23 successive innings in which he’s failed to take more than two wickets, maybe he thinks he’s due.
Where do we get this ridiculous notion that long-serving cricketers should go out in style? The birth of a career should be soundtracked by a scream (and Southee’s certainly was) but the end should come with a whimper or possibly a weird, unnerving gurgle.
You don’t want to go out at the top of your game. You want to go out when everything is unequivocally behind you. No regrets, nothing left to look forward to, time to move on.
You wouldn’t want it to continue indefinitely, but now that Southee’s departure is confirmed, this protracted malaise is good and helpful for anyone who has invested in his career. It helps us all come to terms with the loss of a man who has done a thing or two for this Test team over the years: 389 wickets, 95 sixes, a World Test Championship.
So as he runs in at Seddon Park this weekend, England and New Zealand fans alike should be yearning for the same thing from Tim Southee: an unremitting onslaught of 125km/h long hops.
