WHERE’S the supersub rule when you need it? As England subsided to 21 for five on Thursday, you longed for them to be able to bring on a sixth batsman in place of Ashley Giles. And the batsman in question, the most reassuring sight you could wish for at that moment, was Graham Thorpe.

Yesterday, the possibility of one last recall, already faint, was snuffed out with Thorpe’s decision to retire. It isn’t just the end of a fine Test career. It’s the end of an era, the Nineties generation of Mike Atherton, Alec Stewart, Nasser Hussain and Thorpe – four men with 444 Test caps between them. And it’s the end of a strain of English batsmanship: the bloodyminded battler.

Since Hussain’s sudden retirement a year ago, Thorpe had been the only England batsman offering ugly runs. A crisp counter-attacker in his youth, he had long since matured into a supplier of guts, grit and glue.

His tenacity could change the script. At Edgbaston in 1997, in an Ashes series that began like this one, he added 288 with Hussain to make sure England didn’t throw away their storming start. In Pakistan in 2000-01, Thorpe made runs in all three Tests to sneak an outrageous victory. Then, in a series decider in Colombo, he did it again by hanging in there and making 113 and 32, undefeated, when England’s next best score was 26.

Against South Africa in 2003, he bounced back from the misery of a custody battle to make a series-levelling hundred at the Oval. In the West Indies, most of England’s runs in the first three Tests were eked out by their old gits, Thorpe, Hussain and Mark Butcher. In South Africa last winter, despite batting with all the elegance of a crab, Thorpe still managed a hundred to save the second Test and an 80 to preserve England’s 2-1 lead in the fifth.

His career ended incongruously with two Tests against Bangladesh that were absurdly easy for a man of his talent, even when out of form. He would surely have been picked for the Ashes if the selectors had asked themselves one pertinent question: which batsmen were most likely to score runs against Australia? Michael Vaughan would have topped that list, but Thorpe might well have come second. He was a better bet than Ian Bell (gifted but green), Marcus Trescothick (fragile against Australia) or Andrew Strauss (sophomore slump). In ditching him, the selectors showed admirable faith in the future – and threw 12 years’ hard-earned know-how into the bin. Their mistake was to let it boil down to Thorpe v Kevin Pietersen. It was like choosing between salmon and raspberries.

Bloodymindedness, the quality once provided by Geoffrey Boycott and John Edrich, Chris Tavaré and Peter Willey, Atherton and Jack Russell, is out of fashion now, and Test cricket is more fun as a result. But it is still needed: Justin Langer has it, and Simon Katich, and they were the two members of Australia’s top six to scrape 20 on Thursday.

In Thorpe’s absence, Bell tried to hold England together, but didn’t have a tight enough defence. The man who ended up being the glue was Pietersen, of all people. He played himself in, watched the ball, eschewed risk, and played the longest innings of a day when all the hype turned to hyperactivity. Yesterday he was his swashbuckling self again. But for his first two hours as a Test batsman, he had done a passable imitation of Graham Thorpe.