On Monday morning Moeen Ali called time on his Test match career, these were 64 matches of frustration, elegance, match-winning contributions and perhaps a splash more frustration and elegance.
He retires with 195 Test match wickets and five centuries, several matches and one series won under his all-round influence.
Still, describing these feats, there is a sense that he could have achieved more.
Moeen was brought into the Test side in 2014 to bring balance to a side which had just been Mitchell Johnson’d to the tune of 5-0 Down Under, whose premier spin bowler – Graeme Swann – had recently retired.
In just his second game, the second of the Sri Lanka series, he finished 108* in a heroic rear-guard innings as Sri Lanka took the last wicket of James Anderson late on the final day to claim a dramatic victory. In the following series against India, he took a six-wicket haul when England won their first Test since the previous summer against Australia.
At the end of that summer Moeen fever had swept the nation including T-shirts with: “The beard that’s feared.”
Whilst this was a symbol of an all-round excellence that would win England plenty more matches, it also was a career in microcosm.
He produced match-winning performances on many an occasion with both bat and ball, but rarely in the same series.
No tour illustrated this more clearly than England’s trip to the sub-continent to play Bangladesh and India at the back end of 2016, moving into 2017.
Against Bangladesh he averaged just 23 with the bat but took 11 wickets across the two matches at an average of 22. In the series that followed against India, he took just 10 wickets at an average of 64 but scored two centuries with the bat including 146 made at number four.
After these two displays, followed his magnum opus, joining a select club of the game’s greatest all-rounders. Only 18 players have scored 250 runs and taken 25 wickets in a series in the history of Test match cricket, and only two have achieved this feat in a four-match series. The two in question? Moeen Ali and Sir Richard Hadlee.
As a cricketer he will be remembered for periods of brilliance, and moments of mind-boggling brain fades, some choose to harp on his career averages, but they would miss the point by a fair distance.
A batting average of 28 and a bowling average of 36 may not seem overly inspiring on the surface, but when you consider Ali was brought into the side as a batter who could provide some handy spin on helpful surfaces, well actually that confuses matters further.
A batting average of 28 is really nothing to write home about but having batted every position between 1 and 9 throughout his career, he can hardly be blamed if he was often unsure of his exact role in the order.
When people are quick to jump to the defence of other all-rounders – think Ben Stokes a few years back – and tell you that their stats do not tell the whole story, consider why this luxury has rarely been afforded to Moeen throughout his peaks and troughs.
It does tend to illustrate perfectly the fickleness of a fanbase who seemed to expect a player who batted properly, brought attacking late-order runs, bowled part time off-spin and also ran through teams as the primary spinner.
These same people have little answer when told that Moeen is one of three England men’s batters -Sir Alastair Cook and Joe Root the others – to have scored four centuries in a calendar year. Or that his bowling strike rate of 60 is the best of any post-war English spinner. Since the beginning of 2018 he also snared 64 wickets at an average of 30, including his lean spell on return to the side this summer.
One of the most elegant players in the world game when on song, he has won England many-a-match over the years, this does not mean we should ignore the frustrating parts of his game, but he will always be remembered as a key member of the England Test side over his career.
Above all, however, will be how he is remembered away from the 22 yards of cutgrass. Ali is and will continue to be a role model to many people, but perhaps most to the British-Asian community and as he said himself to ESPN Cricinfo, ‘hopefully things will be easier for the next British Muslim’ and people can say ‘Moeen made it easier for me’.
Moeen certainly made watching Test cricket easier, and he deserves to leave the arena on his terms.