Courageous Harris defiant to the last

While a decorated and venerated international career might have ended with pain and regret in the inauspicious surrounds of Chelmsford, the fact that Ryan Harris had dragged himself to the cusp of yet another Test return is in itself a minor medical miracle.

Harris has endured a string of chronic knee problems throughout a career that has seen him progress from a hard-hitting batting allrounder who bowled some handy medium-fast into one of the most potent new-ball bowlers in world cricket.

In the months leading up to his first Ashes Test in 2010, less than a year after he made his belated Test debut at the age of 30, Harris did not expect the dodgy joint that was all but denuded of cartilage and seemingly held together by scar tissue would carry him to the line.

I play every game like it's my last: Harris

Earlier in the year he had undergone his third bout of surgery to the knee which he would also regularly have drained of its build-up of fluid.

But after slogging away as a journeyman domestic player for his native South Australia and then Queensland, the boy from Adelaide’s unfashionable northern suburbs was not about to let a bit of bone-on-bone knee soreness curtail his international dream.

He underwent another of the endless rounds of rehabilitation programs that have been as much a feature of his career as the cult status he now enjoys with those who like their cricketers for grunt rather than glamour, and made muster for the second Test in Adelaide.

The epitome of a gritty Australian fast bowler

The fact that he was able to soldier through 29 overs as Kevin Pietersen blew Australia away with a double century was remarkable.

That he followed up with a match-deciding 6-47 just 12 days later in the second innings in Perth was integral in forging his image as Australia’s most valuable and indestructible bowler.

By the end of the subsequent Boxing Day Test he was sidelined again, suffering a stress fracture of the right ankle that cost him eight months out of the Test side.

From there, Harris’s availability to lead Australia’s attack has been virtually on a match-by-match basis but such is his value to the Test team he has been 'managed' through countless recovery sessions and rehabilitation periods in the knowledge that he can win matches when fit.

That was the strategy heading into the 2013 Ashes series in England when he sat out the opening Test but returned for the final four to be Australia’s leading wicket-taker for the campaign.

His new-ball partnership with Mitchell Johnson in the Australian Ashes summer that followed was pivotal to the five-nil whitewash result that returned the urn.

Harris breaks Carberry's bat at SCG in 2014

And his last-day, last-gasp heroics in limping through excruciating knee and hip pain to seal a series win in South Africa that sent his team atop the world rankings will long remain a favoured tale of cricket folklore.

"At the start of (that) day he was struggling to walk let alone bowl," skipper Michael Clarke said at the time of what he went on to describe as one of the bravest bowling efforts he had seen.

Having put himself through massages, dry needling, strapping, painkillers and with 30 millilitres of fluid drained from his knee before he took the field, Harris was then booked in for major surgery in Australia the following week to have floating cartilage and bone removed and bone spurs shaved.

Behind the scenes of Ryno's MRI

A further nine months of gruelling rehabilitation saw him make it back for three of last summer's four Tests against India, but he was then set on another recovery program with the single ambition of having him as close to peak fitness as his 35-year-old body can expect for this Ashes tour.

Harris admitted last week after his comeback match against Kent in Canterbury that - when told the schedule included 16 weeks of punishing gym training in addition to a hefty, tailored bowling regime at the Bupa National Cricket Centre in Brisbane - he doubted he could get through it.

But having previously announced that he planned to extract every last ounce of cricketing life from his burly but unreliable frame and that he would have no qualms if his final appearance saw him sprawled on the pitch with every atom spent, he got through it.

Just a week ago, Harris declared 'I'm here to play all five Tests'

Only to have the problem quite literally blow up at his first outing in England.

No matter the latest prognosis, Harris didn’t readily raise the white flag.

"If I sit on the side for all five Tests and we win the Ashes, that's the way it's got to be," he said during the Canterbury game with no inkling as to the potential prescience of his words.

"As long as we win … (but) I hope that (being cast as a spectator) is not the case."

Sadly for one of the most beloved servants of Australian cricket, that is indeed the future.

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