Last of Old Guard

At some point during this Test match, his 129th, Alec Stewart will go up and down behind the stumps for his country for the 150,000th time. That's a very rough estimate, mind, and The Gaffer, perhaps the most meticulous man in the history of the game, no doubt has a more precise figure recorded somewhere in neat handwriting.

But Stewart has put those knees and his back under tremendous pressure at the highest level for 13 years, rarely breaking down, except for the odd crack on his fingers. He is a monument to discipline and commitment.

He is also a throwback in the nicest sense of the word, an old-fashioned career cricketer who has squeezed every ounce of talent from the genes he was given. By some way, he is England's most capped player, and only Steve Waugh, Allan Border, Courtney Walsh and Kapil Dev have played more Tests elsewhere. Graham Gooch (118) and David Gower (117) lurk below him on the list, and there is nobody on the immediate horizon likely to better his record. It is a place in cricket history he has earned without the uncouthness of breaking sweat.

As reliable as the rain, Stewart seems to have been with us for ever and is, according to his team-mates, actually getting better at the job he didn't really want, stumping and propping up the middle order. Given a choice, he would have preferred to concentrate on batting at the top of the innings, as he did in the early Nineties. But he has never complained, his versatility and willingness to sacrifice personal glory for the good of the team often compensating for the failings of others. And he has seen off all challenges to his wicketkeeping with unhurried efficiency.

When asked, he was proud to be captain. As proud, most likely, as anyone ever entrusted with the honour, and would, in all seriousness, have had the crowd singing God Save The Queen before every Test, let alone Jerusalem. He did the job too mechanically for some, his instincts leading him inevitably towards the orthodox rather than the daring.

But, along with Lieutenant Colonel Ronald Stanyforth, a London-born Yorkshireman who led the team in his only four Tests on a tour of South Africa in 1927-28, Stewart is the only wicketkeeper to have captained England. The abiding image of him is that of the immaculately dressed and cheery storeman who knows where all the flanges are.

His tidiness and composure send out a message of calm, even when England's bowlers are under the cosh, as for too long in this match. Quietly, he chirrups away at bowlers and fielders, more avuncular than, say, that more direct urger Ian Healy. Sledging has never been Stewart's way.

Like all good pros, he has grooved his game to the point where he hardly need think about the mechanics of his batting, just respond to familiar stimuli: slow bouncer sitting up - pull to leg; full outside off-stump - stroke square, but don't thump too hard; screaming yorker - jam down and hope.

All the while, there is something of the Gene Kelly rather than Fred Astaire about the choreography of Stewart's movements in front of and behind the stumps, more workmanlike than God-givenly fluid.

And soon he will be gone. When, selectors and circumstances willing, he walks off his beloved Oval for the last time as an England player at the end of the Fifth Test in September, Stewart will be 40 years and 153 days old, and hardly looking it, a national treasure of sorts, the Stanley Matthews of cricket.

He will have his immaculately pressed collar up and will march back towards the home dressing room with the short-stepped precision of a guardsman. When he sits down later, between perusing the Chelsea fixture list, home and away, he will have time to look back on a remarkable career. He arrived at the party late, and - unlike him - he is leaving rather a long time after everyone else.

Gone home years ago are contemporary revellers such as Ian Botham (1992) and Gooch (1995). Still there, but probably not for much longer, is Nasser Hussain, whose Test career also started in 1990, when he shared a room on England's tour of West Indies with a player he described as 'a very organised cricketer'.

Hussain was just out of university; Stewart was a hardened county pro. They made their Test debuts together, in Kingston, Jamaica, and since have maintained cordial relations without being in each other's pockets. Both are determinedly their own man.

From the outset, Stewart had faith in his technique, which has hardly changed since his Surrey debut 22 years ago. As Hussain pointed out last summer: 'If you could look at a video of the way I batted then and now, there would be some big changes, whereas he played very much the same way then as he does now. He has always been a very busy player, picking up his bat and looking to play shots, all fast-twitch muscles and boundaries, the opposite of Mike Atherton.'

Stewart was 26 in his first Test, old by modern standards. It is unlikely there will be so old a retiree for a while either. The last England player to leave the game when over 40 was Gooch, who was 199 days into his 41st year at the end of the Fifth Test against Australia on the 1994-95 tour. Once, it was not unusual to see middle-aged men in Test cricket, particularly for England. Of the 102 players over 40 to have played Test cricket, 52 have been English, including the oldest of them all, Wilfred Rhodes. The Yorkshire all-rounder was 52 years 165 days old when he played in the Fourth Test against West Indies in Kingston on the 1929-30 tour.

Rhodes had played his first Test at 21 against Australia at Trent Bridge in 1899, alongside WG Grace, and was recalled for the historic Oval Test of 1926, aged 48, after an absence of five years. That Test was also the last for England's oldest wicketkeeper, Herbert Strudwick, who was 46 years and 202 days old. That England won that Test and the series, after many years of Australian dominance, says much about either the contemporary suspicion of youth or the reverence for the greybeards.

It wouldn't happen now. Duncan Fletcher, the England coach, has them in and out of the gym or resting between big games, centrally contracted and honed to the highest levels of fitness. What is obvious, too, is that the leanest and sharpest is the old man behind the stumps.

What Stewart also brings to the England set-up is a quiet authority, more so even that when he was captain. As a senior figure slightly off centre stage, he is able to guide rather than demand, to suggest rather than threaten.

One incident on England's otherwise awful winter tour lingers in the memory. It was in the team hotel in Port Elizabeth after they had cocked it up when in sight of beating Australia in the World Cup and, after nearly five months away from home, were definitely in demob mode. One younger member of the squad had stayed up all night and carried on the next day.

As he swayed in front of his gin and tonic at the bar with a couple of journalists, Stewart took him aside and suggested he might like to go to bed before he started mouthing off indiscreetly in front of the hacks. He went without demur. It was 7pm.