Adil Rashid should not be pilloried for walking away from first-class cricket - but that doesn’t stop it being sad

The chilling thing about all this is that nobody is to blame at all. Not Rashid, not economics, not even Test cricket itself

Adil Rashid will only play white-ball cricket for Yorkshire during the 2018 season (Getty)

Maybe, ultimately, Adil Rashid will make fools of those writing premature obituaries for his Test career. His decision to give up first-class cricket with Yorkshire for the 2018 season is, he insists, a temporary one: a fleeting experiment that could quite easily be aborted. And yet to accept his words at face value would be to ignore one of the brutal realities of cricket these days: nobody ever really drifts back into the red-ball game. You only ever drift away.

Naturally, the tendency here will be to assign blame. This is 2018, after all. Somebody must always be to blame, whether it is the England selectors, the ECB, or Rashid himself.

But perhaps the really chilling thing about all this is that nobody, really, is to blame at all. Everybody here has acted entirely rationally, even considerately. It is cricket’s uncontrollable riptides, the rapacious pelt of market forces and declining human attention spans that have brought us to this point.

Those seeking to fit Rashid for the sackcloth of the cricketing mercenary miss the point. Rashid is giving up a County Championship contract for nothing in return. He has no Indian Premier League or Pakistan Super League deal. T20 Blast commitments will prevent him from playing in this summer’s Caribbean Premier League. England’s tour of Sri Lanka this November - yet to be finalised - may impinge on his involvement in the Bangladesh Premier League or the new Global League in South Africa.

In the short-term at least, this decision will leave him out of pocket.

And so we should be wary about assigning this decision solely to economics. Professional athletes are people too, and make their decisions for a wild and complex thicket of reasons. Enjoyment seems to be at least as significant a factor for Rashid here: it would have been easy for him to keep trundling in for another few months, bowling inconsequential five-over spells on May greentops, taking the money: “going through the motions”, as he put it. Instead, he has been honest about his lack of motivation. That should be applauded.

The County Championship trundles on (Getty)

We should be wary, too, about interpreting Rashid’s decision as a blow to the prestige of Test cricket. Only this week Jos Buttler gave an interview in which he predicted that Twenty20 might become the game’s only format within 15 or 20 years. But even Buttler, the closest thing English cricket has to a short-form specialist tinged his prediction with a degree of lament, insisting that the five-day game remains “the pinnacle”.

No, Test cricket clearly retains its cachet, for now at least. What should concern it the most is where its next generation is going to come from.

For the majority of county players, the Championship remains the gold standard of the domestic game, the trophy most county players would pick above all others. Daryl Mitchell, Worcestershire’s stalwart opening batsman, once told me he would rather win the Championship than play for England. But for a significant and growing minority, many of them spin bowlers and big-hitting batsmen who find spring and autumn conditions conspiring against them, this is no longer true.

Cricket needs more than just the international game (Getty)

Cricket needs an international game, of course it does. But it needs the stuff beneath it, too. It needs players willing to toil in domestic competition, playing for a basic wage in front of crowds of a few hundred (and outside the bigger nations, even less). It needs players who devote their lives to breaking into Test cricket. It needs some of them to fail. And for those who fail, it needs to have been worth their while. Sure, county cricket put a roof over your head for 15 years. But was it, you know, any fun?

The slow seepage of players like Rashid away from this form of cricket suggest not. And here we run into the other main issue: the gradual strangulation of the traditional pathway from England’s one-day team to the Test side. It was the route taken by many of the champion cricketers of England’s golden decade - Kevin Pietersen, Andrew Strauss, Graeme Swann, Paul Collingwood, Matt Prior, James Anderson, Stuart Broad. And yet in recent years, that route has been all but closed off.

Even in an age when divergence between the formats is as wide as ever, the numbers suggest that a solid run in the one-day team can often be a far better predictor of Test pedigree than a sparkling first-class record. In the last five years, 78 per cent of England Test debutants who had already played five or more white-ball games have since gone on to play 10 Tests or more. Just 16 per cent of those who had not - including Zafar Ansari, Liam Dawson and the endless conveyor belt of opening batsmen - can say the same.


 The all-format cricketer is becoming an illusion 
 (Getty)

Where is English cricket’s Jasprit Bumrah or David Warner? Might Jason Roy have been a better bet than Keaton Jennings? Sam Billings over Tom Westley? David Willey over Jake Ball? Our chances of finding out seem to be diminishing by the series.

As England crashed to a 4-0 defeat in Australia, the likes of Buttler, Eoin Morgan, Alex Hales and Rashid watched on television, their skills lost to the longer format, perhaps forever. Meanwhile, Joe Root’s T20 game is withering on the vine, much to his evident annoyance. At the elite level of the game, the all-format cricketer is increasingly becoming an illusion.

And so, here we are. Rashid, a spinner approaching his peak years, having never played a home Test, has made his bed. Again: we should resist the tendency to point fingers here. The England management clearly saw something in Rashid that convinced them he wasn’t up to scratch. The ECB are simply trying to run a domestic game, a dozen representative teams, organise a new T20 competition and keep the wolf from the door all in the same six months.

Meanwhile, the continents are drifting. The game is breaking apart. And saying it's all inevitable doesn’t make it any less sad.