Retiring to secure a future..

So Flintoff, Oram, Bond and now Lee. The list of players quitting test cricket to prolong their 'career' is growing steadily. Though as little as 5 years ago test cricket might have been the only career players would have worried about. But now in comes IPL, and its easy to see changing priorities. Though to be fair first three of those have had a long history of injuries and Lee, well he has little chance of actually making the test 11 so you can't blame him. But I wonder if we are going to see more of these retirements from some aspect of cricket to prolong careers. Some impending retirements could be:

Irfan Pathan - retiring from bowling medium pace. Slow medium bowling and lower order hitting is well suited to IPL.

Shane Warne - from texting, to prevent any RSI before IPL.

Ricky Ponting - from being himself, in trying to endear himself to IPL audiences.

Jesse Ryder and Andrew Symonds - yearly retirement from pubs after Christmas till IPL is over, twice a year if their team makes Champions League.

Tendulkar - from talking to his bowlers 4 times in an over, 8 times if its the last 5; so he can preserve his vocal cords for the post game interviews.

Sehwag - from thinking during a game (very little evidence he does that anyway, unless Sachin is on non-striker's end).

VVS Laxman - from hitting 6s.

Yusuf Pathan - from hitting singles, or twos or threes.

Dwayne Bravo and Harbhajan Singh - from celebrating after getting a wicket.

Shahid Afridi - from snacking during a game or practising his dance moves mid-pitch.

Vettori - from carrying NZ cricket (ok maybe this one is bit unlikely, but surely he would love to)

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A few simple pre-emptive measures is all that is needed to ensure all cricketing stars lucky enough to have been picked up by an IPL franchise continue to have a long fruitful IPL career; with some tests and ODIs thrown in between to fill up the remaining 6 months of the year outside IPL window.