Alex Loudon retires from cricket

Posted by
< 1 minute read

At the age of 27. Uninjured.

This is why we shouldn’t allow Old Etonians to become professional cricketers. What kind of a person gives up professional cricket in favour of ‘a career in business’?

Well congratulations, Alex. You’ll be shaking hands with people for a living before you know it. You can spend the next 30-odd years staring at spreadsheets and having meetings.

You can buy a pointless grey car and put your frigging golf clubs in the back. You can get a Mont Blanc pen and tell people about how you’ve got a Mont Blanc pen, watching their eyes glaze over before you’ve even finished the word ‘Blanc’.

You can go to bars with your mates, drink terrible alcohol at inflated prices and talk about how you can drive from one miserable office full of idiots to a different miserable office full of idiots faster than they can, learning to distinguish between different pointless grey cars in the process.

We’re sure you’ll cheer just as enthusiastically when you get that all-important third quarter contract as you did when you clean-bowled someone in a vital match. We’re sure the guys in Human Resources will give you just as much of an ovation as when you single-handedly won a cup match in front of a sell-out crowd.

It’s probably not necessary to tell you that I’m not particularly happy with Alex Loudon right at this minute.

DON'T BE LIKE GATT!

Mike Gatting wasn't receiving the King Cricket email when he dropped that ludicrously easy chance against India in 1993.

Coincidence?

Why risk it when it's so easy to sign up?

9 comments

  1. Have you even considered for a second that he might be retiring to become a professional monkey wrangler? Well? Have you?
    hmm?

  2. Heavens! I had always assumed that it would take a truly cataclysmic event to shock you out of the somewhat impersonal “we” and inspire a heartfelt, personal “I”.

    I doubt even Alex Loudon could consider Alex Loudon’s retirement to be truly cataclysmic.

  3. Nads.

    Let’s just say it was an opinion piece by one of our writers and we didn’t want to make it an official King Cricket editorial stance.

    Yes. That’s what we were doing. It certainly wasn’t a mistake as might be indicated by the word ‘nads’ at the start this comment.

  4. Personally I don’t think Old Etonians should be allowed to reproduce, let alone become professional cricketers.

  5. Never allowing Etonians to become ‘Old’ would be a start!
    I suggest we kill them all by lining Sir Robert Of Key up at the gate on graduation day, flinging full length balls at him, and letting him smash sublime cover drives at their heads all day.. Robert, Sir of Key, would be delighted, for the chance of a knock about (especially if we promise PIE), we’d be delighted at the end result, and surely the selectors would realise that they’d made a grave mistake (fearing for a sublimely timed cover drive to the head), and send him to Sri Lanka where he obviously belongs.

    Huzzah

  6. I just looked up Gavin Robertson and found this:

    “The term “roller-coaster career” would probably rarely be more applicable to a player in first-class cricket than Sydney-born offspinner Gavin Robertson”.

    I’m not sure that I would have described Loudon’s career as “roller-coaster”. If it were a fairground ride at all, it would maybe be the TopSpin.

  7. is Rob Key an alumnus of Dulwich College? Last time I checked, that was hardly a gritty inner city sink estate comp.

  8. Perhaps someone should ask public schoolboys if they really need all that coaching they get from retired county professionals.
    Anybody can play cricket in this country but if you play it as a kid it’s not long before your heart sinks as the latest Eton rifle unloads his massive coffin from mummy’s Range Rover.
    And then to find out that the kid who was coached within an inch of his life and took up a spot at your county’s academy was just marking time before his dad got him a job in the city… brilliant.

Comments are closed.