19 times his bunny:Mike Atherton © Getty Images

You wait ages for a bogeyman’s retirement, then two come along at once. Glenn McGrath is to join Shane Warne in bowing out after these next two Tests. The most prolific fast bowler of all will walk off arm in arm with the most prolific spinner. McGrath may even find that one of his whitewash predictions has finally come true. That would be a hell of a last hurrah, or as he presumably has it, hurrath.

The limelight at the MCG and the SCG will be unprecedentedly bright, turned up by the sentimentality we sports fans are prone to. Sharing it will suit McGrath more than Warne. Warne is a showman, a conjuror and an innovator, whereas McGrath is none of these. He is more of a surgeon - except that surgeons are supposed to make you better.

At his peak, he didn’t so much bowl teams out as disembowel them. He had a particular taste for English and West Indian flesh. The five men he dismissed ten times or more in Tests were Mike Atherton (a ridiculous 19), Brian Lara (a formidable 15), Jimmy Adams, Sherwin Campbell and Alec Stewart. He defeated them not by being clever, although he was, but by being patient, skilful, confident, and exerting immense control. Warne has expanded the possibilities of bowling; McGrath preferred to narrow them down.

His deities were the eternal verities, line, length, lift, and an upright seam. He showed that you don’t need very much movement to catch the edge. He sometimes moved the ball extravagantly, but those deliveries didn’t tend to be the lethal ones. The bulk of his wickets were taken by standard deliveries, aimed at the top of off stump, and doing just enough. He was both a great attacking bowler and a great run-saver, and the reason was that his stock ball was also his danger ball. Along with Richard Hadlee, he was the most clinical of all the top bowlers.

He made a very good Australian team almost unbeatable. Since the start of the 1997 Ashes, they have played 94 Tests with McGrath there, winning 66 and losing only 12. Without him, they have played 25 Tests, winning 15 and losing eight, so when he has been absent injured or tending his sick wife, the win ratio slips from 70 per cent to 60, but more strikingly, the loss ratio leaps from 13 per cent to 32. And the number of draws halves, because even when things were going against his team, McGrath would slow their opponents down.

He is going at the right time from his point of view. There have been intimations of mortality in this series. His six-for at Brisbane was gained mainly on reputation, as England wilted, and since then he has been just a supporting player, taking tidy two-fors. Kevin Pietersen has shown that you can dance down the wicket to him because you know where the ball will land, and McGrath has not taken that indignity well.

From the team’s point of view, the timing is not so hot. Australia famously suffered when Dennis Lillee, Rod Marsh and Greg Chappell all departed together. This is at least as great a loss, because rather than being spread through the team, it’s half the attack going at once, and more than half the threat. Ricky Ponting’s armoury won’t be empty, but it will be normal.

Who will lead the pack now? With Brett Lee going through another of his blunt patches, Stuart Clark is the only bowler who can be sure of a place in Australia’s next Test series, fitness permitting. The new chairman of selectors, Andrew Hilditch, has taken a stern line over Stuart MacGill’s behaviour issues (you wonder what he makes of Warne’s dissent). The next Aussie Test attack could be Clark, Mitchell Johnson, Shaun Tait and Dan Cullen, with Andrew Symonds or Shane Watson in support. Promising, intriguing, but not daunting. Indian fans, whose team go to Australia next Christmas, can raise their hopes a notch.

	Cricket's foremost entertainer © Stamp Publicity (Worthing)

For cricket, it means the end of one of the very greatest careers. Warne has been not just the most prolific bowler of all, but the foremost entertainer of the modern age. He took the neglected, marginal, difficult art of leg-spin, placed it centre stage, and made it look easy. His prodigious spin was just one of several facets of his game that have been phenomenal: his control, his stamina, his sense of drama, his bowling intelligence. He has made the game more interesting.

You could argue forever about whether he is the greatest bowler of all. He may not even be the greatest of his era – you can make a case for Murali, if you take the view, as most umpires and players do, that his action is legitimate. You can make a case for McGrath, who, unlike Warne, was able to maintain his best form wherever he went, including India.

Of the bowlers I’ve seen from further back, Malcolm Marshall was probably just ahead of all the current crop in his sensational ability to combine menace with guile, and Imran Khan was a complete cricketer, a great fast bowler who was also a fine batsman and captain. But Warne has definitely, in my book, been the greatest of all Ashes bowlers. Like Ian Botham, he is a personality player who felt personally about the romance and history of the Ashes. And thus became a major part of that history.

For Warne himself, it means a new life, probably involving more time with the kids and a microphone in his hand. He has made some bad calls in his private life, but this one, the biggest decision a cricketer has to face, he seems to have got spot-on. His powers had finally begun to fade, but the fact that he has still managed three four-fors in yet another Ashes victory suggests he may have one or two last hurrahs up his sleeve – if, unlike Bradman in 1948, he can keep a tear out of his eye. The 700th wicket will surely come fast, hastened by the cheers of a packed MCG. With two Tests to go, he could even gobble up the 14 he needs for 200 in the Ashes.

For England, it’s a last chance to continue the slightly better work of their past few meetings with Warne. They should be looking to shut out the emotion of the moment, as well as the towering reputation and the inevitable sledges, and make him feel every one of his 37 years. The way Ian Bell (at last) played him on Sunday, with spring heels and an upright bat, will do nicely.

Harmison’s decision is more questionable. Semi-retirement is a good option and one that more players should consider: it has clearly helped Warne. Harmison hasn’t been working as a one-day bowler, and he clearly struggles as much with long absences from home as he does with the one-day wide rule. But he is custom-built for the Caribbean, as he showed in 2004. If he was going to quit before the World Cup, he would have been better off doing it last summer. But I guess he didn’t know he was going to want to. These decisions are not easy.

There is now yet another opportunity for England’s younger brigade. Chris Tremlett is a good pick, a tall, awkward, hit-the-splice bowler who just might be coming through now after shining at the Academy in Perth. But he should be there alongside Stuart Broad, not instead of him. How can the same selectors be wise enough to pick Monty Panesar and dumb enough to leave out Broad?

	'Trescothick has never made an Ashes hundred, and now it begins to look as if he never will' © Getty Images

Trescothick’s timing could be better, but it could also be worse – he could have hung around right up to, or even into, the first Test. As it is, England have a ready-made replacement at the top of the order in Alastair Cook, who should make more runs as an opener, protected to some extent from Shane Warne, than he would have done at number three. And they have a ready-made replacement for Cook in Paul Collingwood, who didn’t deserve to lose his place in the middle order. For the team, this isn't a great blow. They coped with it last time and on this year's form, Trescothick shouldn’t have been in the side anyway. He will be a bigger loss at first slip than at the top of the order. He did great work in the last Ashes in getting England off to rapid starts, but Andrew Strauss, currently playing with a new freedom, has it in him to take up that mantle.

The only problem is that Ian Bell has to move up from six, where he flourished against Pakistan, to three. England would be more comfortable if they had followed the advice of certain bloggers and brought Owais Shah, Mark Butcher or Mark Ramprakash, instead of a sixth seam bowler.

Trescothick has never made an Ashes hundred, and now it begins to look as if he never will. There will be plenty of suggestions, in the overheated world of the British media, that this is the end of his international career. But Graham Thorpe went through similar agonies with his marriage break-up, and eventually fought his way back to enjoy a fruitful last couple of years as a Test batsman.

When Thorpe was recalled for the Oval Test against South Africa in 2003, a match England had to win to square the series, he was extremely nervous. He was calmed down and carried through by his partner – Trescothick. Thorpe made a hundred, Trescothick a double. He is a great team man, who has earned the right to be handled with sympathy.

For Duncan Fletcher, the news is a reminder that this is not 2005 all over again. He now has a different captain, a different vice-captain, and at least two players who didn’t feature in the last Ashes – Cook and Jimmy Anderson, whose rehab took another step forward today – as well as Collingwood, whose role in 2005 was peripheral. Let’s hope this makes Fletcher a little less inclined to cling to his MBEs, and more open to the idea of sticking with the best young slow bowler England have produced in 40 years.

	Brett Lee: Test match or baby? © Getty Images

Most of the comments fall into one of four groups. One lot agrees with me that Brett is in danger of missing one of the biggest moments of his life. Many of those who have written about this are fathers speaking from personal experience. That’s where I was coming from too. A birth is a huge event, life at its most vivid. It’s comparable to losing someone very close to you, only much more fun (for the new dad, anyway). If a top cricketer’s father or mother was on their deathbed, we would quite understand if the player missed a Test match to be there, and we’d be a bit surprised if he played on regardless.

Then there are those who think Brett is right to “put his country before his family”, as one contributor phrased it. Fair enough: it’s a matter of opinion. But this line has come with a few misconceptions attached. One post talked of “girly men”, another of “teary men”. Girly is a bizarre word to try and use as an insult in the context of childbirth. Many women go through more pain having babies than most of us men could stand. If anyone is being feeble here, it is the man who shies away from the maternity ward.

The third school of thought reckons I only suggested that Lee should miss the Test because I’m English. Anyone who wrote on that basis wouldn’t last very long as a cricket writer. I’m all for England players missing Test matches to be at the birth of their children. Michael Vaughan took a break from a Test to do so; Andrew Strauss missed a whole Test; Andrew Flintoff was planning to, until he unexpectedly landed the England captaincy. Personally I think Flintoff should have gone ahead with his trip home. The only good excuse for missing a birth is if you were, say, a heart surgeon with a life to save somewhere else.

The final camp says it’s nobody’s business but Brett’s and his wife’s. Certainly the decision is up to them and I would defend their right to take the view they have. But Brett did go public on the decision. He didn’t say “It’s nobody’s business but ours”. And he was right not to, because sport doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

Cricket, more than any other sport, cuts into family life. This is even true of club players, but it’s especially true of the professionals. Down the years, these tensions have often been swept under the carpet, because top-level cricket has been almost exclusively run and reported, as well as played, by men. So when I edited the Wisden Almanack, one of the main articles I commissioned for the front of the book was a long look at cricket and family life. It was written by Derek Pringle, and entitled Don’t marry a cricketer.

Sport is always more than just sport – if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t have meaning, we wouldn’t be discussing it, and Brett would still be full-time in men’s outfitting. Sport isn’t some distant planet: it’s part of the here and now. And the way top sportsmen live their lives can influence the rest of us. Andrew Flintoff has a new picture book out in which he has included a shot of himself changing his baby’s nappy. Flintoff is so revered that the photo will have ramifications in the world at large. It will make it a little harder for a certain type of dad to say “no, sorry, I don’t do nappies”. Or to think that anybody is “girly” if they do.

Brett Lee comes across as the most likeable man in the Australian dressing-room. He is a fast bowler with a smile where you might expect a snarl, he has a charmingly down-to-earth sideline as a shop assistant in men’s tailoring, and he has had the decency to turn down large sums to invade his own privacy by letting his wedding be photographed. So the thing he said today came as a surprise.

He confirmed that he would definitely play in the first Test against England rather than be with his wife Liz at the birth of their first child, due on the eve of the match.
"We've said right from the start, which is credit to the person that Liz is, I will definitely be playing,” Lee said. "I'm hoping and praying that it either comes early or late. To me, cricket is important, but family is the most important thing in my life. Hopefully I can be there for both.”

Hopefully he can. But he is saying one thing here and planning to do another. If family is really the most important thing for him, then he should be at the birth. He has already played 54 Tests, including plenty against England; he is unlikely to have 54 children. The birth of his first child will be probably the biggest event of his life. And he lives in an age when top sportsmen are no longer expected to sacrifice a moment like that on the altar of their ambition.

Get thee to the maternity ward, Brett. It’s the only place to be when your baby is on the way. You won’t regret it.