Dawid Malan, the former World No.1 batter in T20Is, has announced his retirement from international cricket at the age of 37. Malan, who last played for England in the ODI World Cup in 2023 in India, will end his career with 4,416 runs in 114 matches across three formats. Malan enjoyed a terrific run in the shortest format with the bat, having reigned supreme at the top of the rankings for the longest time and won the T20 World Cup 2022 with England, however, wasn't able to match his consistency in the other two formats.
Malan, who has 1450 runs in ODIs, is one of the only two batters with an average in excess of 55 and a strike rate above 95 with a minimum of 1000 runs in the format. Shubman Gill is the other one. Malan was a late bloomer but turned out to be a prolific run-scorer in white-ball cricket at No 3. Even in his last assignment for England, Malan was one of the few bright spots in an otherwise forgettable World Cup campaign scoring 404 runs at an average of 44.8 including a century and a couple of half-centuries.
However, Malan labelled not playing enough Test cricket as his big regret. "Test cricket was always the pinnacle for me growing up," Malan told The Times while announcing his retirement. "At times I played well but in between just wasn't good enough or consistent enough, which was disappointing because I felt I was a better player than that."
Malan played just 22 Tests in his career, scoring 1074 runs, which included two consecutive tours of Australia. Malan was always an afterthought in Test matches, a backup and never the first-choice, especially in home conditions and hence didn't have numbers in the format to show for.
"I took all three formats extremely seriously but the intensity of Test cricket was something else: five days plus the days building up. I'm a big trainer; I love hitting lots of balls and I'd train hard in the build-up, and then the days were long and intense. You can't switch off. I found it very mentally draining, especially the long Test series that I played, where my performances dropped off from the third or fourth Test onwards," Malan added.
Malan, who recently won the Hundred with the Oval Invincibles, was part of the SA20 winning squad Sunrisers Eastern Cape and is likely to remain in demand on the T20 franchise circuit.
