A superb, if stop-start, career

To have played more Test matches than Bradman, scored more centuries than Trumper and returned an average higher than Mark Taylor’s would seem to satisfy most criteria of a bona fide Australian cricket legend.

But the career of Simon Katich, which formally drew to a close with today’s announcement that he would not return to the KFC Twenty20 Big Bash League next summer, has long carried a faint whiff of not-quite-fulfilled.

Quick Single: Scorcher Katich announces retirement

Perhaps it was a by-product of his prickly competitiveness which Katich himself conceded would occasionally bubble over into a dose of “white-line fever” that gave the impression some sense of unrequited destiny burned deep within him until the end.

Maybe it was the shabby treatment he received from the national selectors more than once across the decade of his stop-start international career, a disservice retrospectively acknowledged by Cricket Australia long after his Test tenure was permanently truncated.

Or possibly it resulted from the expectation he carried from the time he blazed on to the domestic scene as a hugely-talented 21-year-old but whose aesthetically challenging if unquestionably productive batting talent never quite managed to deliver the accolades that beckoned.

But now the time has arrived to reflect on the totality of Katich’s remarkably successful and influential 17-year cricket journey it would be ungenerous as well historically inaccurate to judge him as anything other than one of Australia’s authentic champions of the recent past.

In addition to his 56 Tests (in which he averaged a skerrick above 45), 45 ODIs and a handful of T20 internationals, Katich is one of a select group of just 17 Australians over 100 years and more to have plundered in excess of 20,000 runs in the first-class arena.

With Shane Watson, he formed Australia’s most productive Test opening partnership since Matthew Hayden and Justin Langer and at an even better average stand per innings than their record-breaking predecessors – 54.39 compared to 51.88.

He sits 19th on the list of all-time Sheffield Shield runs scorers (ahead of Greg Chappell) and still holds the record for the most prolific season in the world’s foremost domestic competition courtesy of the 1,506 runs he scored from 17 innings in 2007-08 at an average of 94.13.

That was when, crowned as Shield player of the year, he led his adopted state New South Wales to the title, taking to four the number of Shield-winning teams in which he played including back-to-back crowns with Western Australia in his first two full summers in 1997-98 and ’98-99.

It was on the strength of the 900-plus runs he compiled in the second of those seasons that Katich was identified as the hottest young batting talent among a stellar emerging cast and sent to Sri Lanka with Steve Waugh’s Test squad in September 1999.

Which is where fate, in the itchy red form of chicken pox that later evolved into glandular fever, intervened and robbed Katich of his immediate place on the Test periphery as well as his sense of smell for perpetuity.

By the time Katich returned to fitness and form, Ricky Ponting had nailed down the rare batting vacancy in Australia’s lower-middle order and the son of a Perth police detective was compelled to wait almost two years for his moment to come – via an injury to Waugh – on the 2001 Ashes tour.

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A return of just 15 runs in that match was never going to secure him a berth, and it was more than two years later when Katich received his next opportunity – against Zimbabwe in Sydney – and he seized it by scoring a maiden Test half-century and claiming career-best figures of 6-65 with his left-arm wrist spin.

His first Test century came later that summer against India, and when he survived for five hours against Muthiah Muriladaran bowling in familiar Colombo climes in the first Test of the subsequent series, Katich had reason to feel reassured he had snared a measure of tenure in the Australian XI.

It was also when he became brutally aware of the vagaries of selectors’ whims, harshly jettisoned after that match to make way for Andrew Symonds only to be reinstated two Tests later and dumped again in the fall-out from Australia’s Ashes loss in England in 2005.

When he finally received a decent run at Test cricket in 2008 he had re-invented himself as an opener in a team that was being rebuilt following the retirements of batting mainstays Justin Langer, Damien Martyn and Adam Gilchrist, and with his new opening partner Matthew Hayden also nearing the end.

Tried alongside Phil Jaques, Phil Hughes and finally Watson, Katich’s maturity and reliability against the new ball was invaluable as Ponting undertook the unenviable job of fashioning a new team to try and follow in the footsteps of the immortals gifted to his captaincy predecessors.

From the time he took on the opener’s job in 2008 to when he was summarily dumped in the wake of Australia’s first home Ashes loss in 25 years in 2011, Katich was Australia’s leading Test runs scorer (2,928), boasted the best average (50.48) and, with Michael Clarke, the most centuries (eight apiece), and was a deserved winner of his country's Test Player of the Year award for 2010.

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In addition to his distinctive, front-on batting technique which saw him shuffle across the crease in the moments prior to the bowler’s release, Katich showed himself to be his own man off the field as well.

An infamous run-in with then vice-captain Clarke in the SCG dressing rooms following a nail-biting Test win over South Africa in 2009 will be as indelibly associated with Katich’s Australian career as his 10 Test centuries.

Legend has it that Katich grabbed Clarke after the current Test captain apparently intimated he would like the traditional post-victory team chant to be sung sooner rather than later so that he could attend a social engagement.

So when his 2010-11 Ashes campaign was cut short by an achilles tendon injury, Ponting stood down as skipper and Clarke was appointed, and the national selection panel of Andrew Hilditch, Greg Chappell and Jamie Cox decided the time was ripe for regeneration, it was Katich who was sacrificed.

Not that he went quietly.

The decision to not only axe the best-performed batsman of the previous three years from the Test XI but also strip him of his Cricket Australia contract prompted justified public disquiet and no less voluble outrage from Katich.

“If you pay peanuts you get monkeys,” Katich railed at the selectors, who themselves were about to be revamped out of a job following the completion of the post-Ashes Australian Team Performance Review.

“I’m extremely frustrated and disappointed with the decision.

“I also want to make it clear that I am not the only player who has gone through this over the last couple of years due to an inconsistent selection policy.

“I just hope that something good comes out of this situation because I thought the decision was absolutely ridiculous.”

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He won the subsequent support of Ponting, who wrote in his 2013 autobiography ‘At the Close of Play’: “In my view, (Katich’s dumping) was as dumb a non-selection as any during my time with the Australian team.

“I knew we couldn’t afford to cast such a player aside so easily (and) if the selectors were now rating potential ahead of performance this was the first we knew of it.”

More than two years later, newly-installed CA Chairman Wally Edwards admitted the decision to get rid of Katich at a time when the faltering Test line-up needed all the stability and experience it could muster was short-sighted and wrong.

“That was a decision made by the selectors at the time because you had three guys – Katich, Ponting and (Michael) Hussey – all the same age and three key batters who were all going to go (from the game) at once.

“The selectors made a judgment call to try to transition through that and didn't get it right.

“Katich would've been a valuable player. But that's their call.”

Katich refused to walk away from the game, continuing for another season at Shield and English county level before finishing with a flourish by leading the Perth Scorchers to their inaugural BBL title last summer.

Fittingly, his farewell on-field appearance came in front of ecstatic fans in the city of his birth, clutching a trophy and frosted in tickertape.

An Australian cricket success story through to the final chapter.

Simon Katich