With all top-class players, what starts to go, I think, is not the runs, but the inevitability of being able to score those runs, the assurance of performance. When we went to Australia in 2003-04, there was an inevitability to Ponting scoring runs, and sure enough, he got two double-centuries in the series. It was understood that this guy was going to make us pay.
By the time we played him in 2012, that inevitability had gone, that sense of the expected. It's not that they can't score or that they won't, but the certainty in their batting goes. You know you can fight for some time, like Ricky did, because you don't want to let other people down, but I think he did realise in the end that he doesn't want to play sport like that. Cricket will be the poorer without him but retirements are like the runs made by the great players - inevitable.
