LONDON: Graeme Swann has insisted he did the right thing quitting midway through England’s 5-0 Ashes series thrashing despite Graham Gooch calling the decision ‘criminal’.

England great Gooch, the team’s batting coach on their woeful 2013-14 tour of Australia, told Daily Telegraph on Wednesday that the former off-spinner’s decision had been highly damaging to the team.

“It made us a laughing stock,” said Gooch, one of England’s most successful opening batsmen. “I cannot understand why he couldn’t stick it out until the end of the trip. It left a bad taste.”

Swann quit, with England 3-0 down, in December 2013 after deciding a longstanding elbow injury meant it was no longer possible for him to spin the ball properly.

“I understand [what he is saying],” Swann told several British newspapers. “Goochy is very old school. Perhaps if he had gained my perspective on it he might have seen the reasons why I did it. I think he is a bit misinformed thinking I just left because of form. It wasn’t because of form.

“It was because I just couldn’t turn a cricket ball, which, as a spin bowler, means you are useless to your team. It wasn’t a form thing, it was succumbing to the inevitable.”

Swann added he had made a mistake in not retiring after England’s 3-0 home Ashes win in 2013.

“In retrospect, I shouldn’t have gone on the tour at all,” he said. “That is my regret. I wish after The Oval Test I had read the signs more rather than just think, ‘I will be fine. Jim [Anderson] will get 30 wickets. I will only have to hold one end up. I will be fine and we will win the Ashes’. That is my only regret.”

Swann has dismissed Pietersen’s recently-published book as the ‘the biggest work of fiction since Jules Verne’.

Published in Dawn, October 17th, 2014