The Day When Form Could Not Be Regained By Oldies

There was a time when players used to be able to breathe. Though cricket was still played in a fare quantity but just players could breathe and be calm. When I say players could breathe, I mean to say that if a player had bad form, he could have relaxed a bit and regained his form. 

Recently, we have just seen the retirement of one of the greats (though not all time) according to me of the modern game, Mathew Hayden. He was an absolute bully and an intimidator of any attack that he played against, but what did he get at the end of his purple patch??

An invisible but strong push which was made to look like an retirement on his own terms. It just took selectors two series of bad form to remove Hayden from their limited overs plans. Hayden had just come back from injury when he played in India and had that bad tour.

He followed it up with terrible home form against the proteas (South Africa). but that's all it took the selectors to start moving on. Just two terrible series and gone!!!!

Another case has been Rahul Dravid who though still is not out of the team is very much on the edge of it. he has been out of form for two years and now has also been removed form the ODI's. He has been a wall that I think has crumbled more due to the fact he is not a great entertainer and also not a fast scorer than his bad form.

The public, the media and even a few cricket writers like us have been on his case for a very long time. Everyone seems to have forgotten that he was the man who stood tall for more than half a decade while the Ganguly and Tendulkar weren't really the most consistent. I won't be surprised if I pick up tomorrows news paper and read he has decided to retire.

Sourav ganguly and Anil Kumble have been two more Indians who have absolutely been pushed out despite a very short period of bad form. Kumble crumbled after the tour of Australia and ganguly had one bad series against Sri Lanka and was dropped from the Irani trophy squad for the rest of India while all the other test players were a part of it. 

Other than that there have been cases of Micheal Vaughan Jacques Kallis to a much lesser extent. Vaughan has been dropped from england's ODI squad and now also from the test squad after his captaincy resignation for over a year while Kallis was not selected for the t20 world cup.

Though they are in no danger of being absolutely wiped of but they are forming into something of that kind. Maybe in a few years

All the people I have talked of are old. I did not mention this initially since I also wanted to raise the problem of being dropped after such a temporary run of bad form or being overly criticized for not being an entertainer separately.

But has age made people so unacceptable that they are thought of as players who you have to get done with as soon as possible. this has been one of the down side of t20. young has started being considered gold. There used to be a time when old was gold.