We gain the impression, as we age, that policemen, doctors and cricketers are getting ever younger. In the case of county cricketers, at any rate, the impression is correct. Assuming that Mike Gatting and Tim Robinson will definitely have retired, no 40-year old will start the County Championship next season, probably for the first time since its formation. So young has this profession become, there were only 27 registered players over the age of 35 at the start of the season: less than 10% of the total number. The gnarled old sweat of a county pro has become as much a thing of the past as Dixon of Dock Green, or Dr Cameron of Tannochbrae.

The same trend is evident among England's Test cricketers, if we take the average age of the team for the first Test of each home Ashes series, giving us a century of data. It had better be home series because the best players did not always choose to go on tour before the First World War; and it had better be Ashes series because experiments in selection have been made against other countries. But against Australia England's selectors have always picked their best eleven or, giving them the benefit of the doubt, endeavoured to; and we can assume that the best players are more likely to be fit and available at the start of a series than at the end. A century ago, by this reckoning, the average age of the England team was greater than it is now, though not by much. Indeed in 1899 it sank below 30 the moment that Dr. WG Grace, aged 50, was dropped after the first Test, or rather dropped himself. In his new biography of WG, Simon Rae explains that the Old Man got his resignation in first: he could only field at point, though he took a fine one handed catch there in the Nottingham Test, and could not run any twos, let alone threes, so he deposed himself as England's captain. In 1902 the average age of England's first Test team was 29, and it had a claim to be the strongest our country has ever fielded, as every one of its members made a first-class hundred. The age rose to 31 in 1905, and to 34 in 1909, when only Jack Hobbs was under 29. Perhaps for this reason in part, the selectors were criticised that year as seldom since: the newspapers resorted to the verbal equivalent of sticking the selectors' heads on the top of turnips. By 1912 it was down to 30.

Between the wars was the heyday of the old cricketer – or should we say, as we age ourselves, the middle-aged one? Before the Great War professionals were not always well-treated by some counties, or else did not well-treat themselves, failing all too often into the underworld of penury and drink, the workhouse and early death. After the war the benefit system was established throughout the counties and was an incentive to keep on playing. An aristocracy of labour emerged too, consisting of eminent professionals who kept furled umbrellas, looked after themselves and were called by their Christian name, not surname, by their skipper. Such role models as Jack Hobbs and Frank Woolley represented England until they were 47, Patsy Hendren until 46. The average age of the England team increased to 33 in 1921, and to the all-time high of 35 in 1926, when age did not wither and the Ashes were regained.

The trend was simultaneously the same in county cricket. Another aristocrat of labour, WG Quaife, made his last first class hundred for Warwickshire at the age of 56, in his only appearance of the season: Graham Gooch would have had to continue playing until the year 2009 to beat that record. As Quaife also bowled 40 overs in that game against Derbyshire, he must have been as tough as he was militant in his views on the second-class treatment of professionals. Wilfred Rhodes, in his three years of first class cricket after the age of 50, averaged 1150 overs a year. In 1928 and 1929 he was one of only eight spinners who took 100 wickets in both of those seasons. In 1929–30 he toured the West Indies and contained George Headley in the Tests, when the third and last 50-year-old to play Test cricket, George Gunn, was also in the England side. Horace wasn't quite right when he sang in his ode, `Laudabunt alii Rhodon' (some will praise Rhodes): on Wilfred's retirement everybody should have praised him for bowling that was almost as good as it had been 30 years before.

It was a foretaste of modern times when England picked a team for the Nottingham Test of 1938 with an average age of 28. The top six included Denis Compton at 20, Len Hutton at 21, and Bill Edrich at 22: who knows, the English fielding may have come closer than ever before to Australian standards. Naturally enough, as these three were still going in 1948, the age rose again to 31, before falling steadily thereafter to the all-time low of 27 in 1961, when the oldest members were Fred Trueman and Brian Statham at 30.

Subsequently England have had only one old Ashes team, in 1972, when Raymond Illingworth assembled Dad's Army to hold the Australians to a shared series

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