Shivnarine Chanderpaul: The Last Man

And then there were none. The retirement of Shivnarine Chanderpaul, the great Guyanese batsman, is the end of an era. He is the last of the old guard; the last of the great heroes from a time before the razzle-dazzle of the new 20/20 cricketing era. The last connection, too, to the time when the West Indies inspired terror, not pity.

He was the last of my own Hornbys and Barlows; the last of the 1974 cohort to slip into the night. The torch will now be carried by other, younger, men. Many of them will prove to be wonderful but it will not be quite the same. My contemporaries no longer play test cricket.

It is hard to think of a cricketer who, in recent times, has had to endure so much for so long with so little reward. No-one would select Chanderpaul in a Greatest XI of our time, but if you needed a man to bat as though your life depended upon it there’d be few – Allan Border, Steve Waugh – you’d select ahead of him.