Martyn reveals reasons for his sudden retirement

Former Australian batsman Damien Martyn has finally revealed the whole truth behind his shock retirement midway through the last Ashes series, saying he had wanted to finish his time earlier in 2006 against South Africa.

Instead, the cajoling of teammates and pre-Ashes hype talked Martyn into going on to the 2006-07 series against England, but he realised by the end of the second Test in Adelaide that he should have been more assertive in telling the team it was time to go.

Martyn’s exit, which arrived via a solitary email to Cricket Australia chief executive James Sutherland, was one of the talking points of the summer, and he admitted he should have quit after making a century against the Proteas in Johannesburg in April 2006, following his recall to the Test team.

“Yeah (retirement) was on the cards but we had to fly out the next day, quickly,” Martyn said.

“Ideally yes I would’ve liked to get back in, made a hundred and said ‘that’s it’.

“I’d lost faith in the system and the way they treated guys and that sort of stuff.

“But we had to go to Bangladesh straight away, then I got injured, hit on the elbow and I came home. “Then you spend five months at home doing nothing and then you get talked back into getting back up and getting ready.

“It really came as a case that I was over it (international cricket), but it wasn’t made easy for me to try and retire, so it was a hard situation and I just kept trying to do the right thing and you play and by the end I’d had enough, wanted to get out and get on with the rest of my life.”

The politics of the Australian team are complex, and in explaining why he told no-one of his final decision, Martyn said there was no easy way to extricate oneself from that environment.

“They might’ve liked a fairytale phone call that morning saying ‘I’m retiring’, but I knew I couldn’t do that in a sense because I’d get talked back into playing, so it was like, what do you do?” he said.

“Everybody in the group, if you walked around a team and told 15 blokes what you were thinking of doing, of retiring or doing this or that, you’d have 15 different answers.

“Some will be your mates who just don’t want your mates to go, some probably want you to go, you get a million different answers, so it’s something you just have to do yourself, stick by it and deal with it.”

In a rare interview, Martyn also expressed empathy for Andrew Symonds, who he described as a virtual kindred spirit and a victim of the machinations of a corporatised game.

“I think Symo’s one of those guys, a bit like myself where we just wanted to get out and play cricket,” Martyn said in an interview for the Wisden Cricketer.

“We grew up as kids, for me I was playing AFL in the back yard and cricket in the front yard, and cricket took off, and next thing I know I’m playing for my country so it’s not like it’s a planned scenario, you’re thrust into this and some guys handle it differently to others.

“They (the authorities) have just got to be prepared to maybe look after guys a bit better.

“We can’t all be the perfect specimen that comes in, talks to a thousand people, does all the media and then goes out and makes hundreds.”

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