LILLY ALLEN AND AUSSIES SAW THE TRUE WORTH OF ONIONS

No visiting batsman relished playing at Durham’s Riverside Ground in the first decade of the new millennium, not with Graham Onions and Steve Harmison bearing down on them Duke ball in hand.

- Derek Pringle

At the time it was the most potent combination in English cricket – bone-crunching pace from one end precision sniping from the other – and most wilted.

Durham won successive County Championships in 2008 and 2009 with the pair rampant alongside other seamers like Callum Thorpe and Liam Plunkett. Onions, though, who announced his retirement from the game this week at the age of 38, was still knocking batsmen over when the county won another Championship pennant in 2013, his relentless pursuit of wickets still a feature.

The reason stated for calling it a day is a second back injury, following the one which incapacitated him for most of 2010 and left him with a metal rod in his back. It is nature’s way. Few pace bowlers remain a useful force once they pass 36, though like James Anderson, a man of similar pace and build, Onions did possess a high skill quotient which kept him relevant beyond that age for both Durham and, latterly, Lancashire.

Onions played nine Tests for England between 2009-12 taking 32 wickets at 29 and would surely have played many more had Anderson not been a direct contemporary.

Eight of his Tests were alongside England’s greatest wicket-taker but generally they were mutually exclusive, both being specialist pace bowlers without much to offer with the bat.

Not many modern teams contain two ‘rabbits’ if it can be avoided and while various injuries set Onions’ cause back the arrival of Stuart Broad and Tim Bresnan, both seam bowlers capable of getting the odd fifty, consigned him to the role of Anderson understudy, though one made redundant by the extraordinary consistency and fitness of the principal.