Farewell to Shane Watson, the definitive 21st century cricketer
Shane Watson’s international record is underrated and his significant success in other fields is understated.
This was partly because of the hermetic conditions under which this season’s Indian Premier League has been played: Watson left the field after his last innings for Chennai Super Kings on October 29 to a canned tumult echoing round empty stands.
But it also showed, again, Watson’s notable preparedness to do things his way. A multiskilled, multi-format cricketer, he has become a multi-platformed, multipurpose cricket personality.
It’s not only because he made his first-class debut on the third day of the new millennium that Watson deserves to be considered our first cricketer of the 21st century: he may be the Australian player who best adapted to the global challenges of the past two decades.
Those whose fandom is confined to international cricket will be complaining. Watson? Hadn’t he retired already, and with a reputation for never quite fulfilling his potential at Test level? There remains a fading race memory of Watson grimly reviewing lbws and hobbling off grounds with injuries: he missed more Tests than he played.
Yet Watson’s Test record stacks up better than most, despite his use as a kind of mortar in the Australian wall: he filled every slot from one to seven in the batting order, filled gaps in attacks with cheap, probing overs, filled slip capably, once even filled in as captain.
Watson’s 5757 runs at 40.54 and 168 wickets at 31.79 also merit a place in Australia’s all-time one-day side. He was not, perhaps, quite so obviously thrilling as Adam Gilchrist. You could see from where the power emanated: those big shoulders, broad as a doorway, and those thick bats, pale as pine. But as opener he took on a burden almost as heavy as Gilchrist’s, at a batting average slightly better and a scoring rate only slightly slower.
His last five years playing only T20 have been an unexpected bonus. Watson can savour the irony of a body that so often let him down at international level seeing him into his 40th year, having allowed him to represent 15 different teams in half a dozen countries.
The IPL from which he signed off might well have been the making of him. An impressionable young man anxious to succeed and conscious of disapproval, he soaked up the experience of having Indian crowds chant his name, and the commercial opportunities that ensued.
A basement bargain for the inaugural league, he ended up being player-of-the-tournament for the triumphant Rajasthan Royals. A decade later, in the final for the Chennai Super Kings against Sunrisers Hyderabad, Watson played what’s arguably the most remarkable T20 innings of all. Struggling with a hamstring injury and unable to score from his first 10 deliveries, he scored 117 from the next 47, despite decelerating in the middle so as to see off the threatening Rashid Khan.
From nearly 150 IPL games, Watson wrung in the vicinity of 4000 runs and a hundred wickets, and was ranked on one algorithmic scale, Cricinfo’s Smart Stats, as its third most impactful player, making a key contribution on average every sixth game — a T20 hit rate rivalled by very few.
Watson was an obsessive tinkerer in Test cricket — sometimes, perhaps, to his detriment. That propensity served him well in the game’s shortest form, which emphasises technical evolution, new variation, disruptive capacity.
With an open blade widening the field, a high grip for maximum leverage, a squat to aid elevation and a swing influenced by baseball and golf, he committed to delivering T20’s most lucrative currency, the six, striking 467 in his 343 games.
The most improbable jag of Watson’s career, however, might be under way right now. It would be wrong to call his relations with the mainstream media strained: even under pressure, Watson was infallibly courteous and frank. But he and television have kept their distance, and his only book, 10 years ago, came off as slightly frustrated and anticipating criticism.
Over the last couple of years, nonetheless, Watson has quietly gone about building a busy social media presence via Facebook, Instagram and YouTube — not in the fashion of the majority, who treat it as a space for further advertisement and endorsement, but as a source for cricket content.
On T20 Stars, Watson blogs, vlogs and pods like a man with a lot to share — and, in the main, he does. He writes intelligently. He talks technique to camera with an affable nerdiness.
Since March, Watson has also done 27 relaxed interviews for his “Lessons Learnt with the Greats” podcasts, including, in June, the last long yarn with the late Dean Jones.
Watson has the advantage of access — everyone’s happy to talk to him, for he has made more friends, as well as more money, than his erstwhile frenemy Michael Clarke.
Amid all that biosecure downtime in Dubai, he talked at length to Faf du Plessis, AB de Villiers, Harbhajan Singh, Lisa Stalekhar, Ricky Ponting and Dwayne Bravo. The tone is friendly but not too matey, serious but not too earnest. Good stuff, actually.
The emergence of players turning content providers, rather than straightforward pundits, is a relatively recent development, accelerated by the circumstances of this IPL, notable for the phenomenon of cricketers interviewing other cricketers and synthetic press conferences as sterile as the surroundings.
It has some intriguing entailments. It will be interesting, for instance, to see how Watson reconciles his new activities with his ongoing public-facing role as president of the Australian Cricketers’ Association.
There are, at any rate, few better-informed or connected personalities in the game. He was a calm, shrewd head during 2017’s pay dispute; when the ACA returns to the negotiating table with Cricket Australia next year, he will be an influential figure again. One innings ends; another begins.
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The retirement of a significant Australian cricketer is usually the occasion for detailed analyses, lengthy obsequies, maybe a lap of a major ground in an open car. Shane Watson last week did it his way, speaking straight to camera from Dubai’s opulent Taj Hotel on his personal YouTube channel, T20 Stars.