CRICKET: Gideon Haigh traces the career of a man whose independent spirit and ruthless combativeness have been central to a period of enormoussuccess for Australian cricket

A large Australian pension-management group has recently launched a series of eye-catching advertisements featuring the familiar pinched features of Steve Waugh. The copywriter has dreamed up the heading: "Retire on your own terms." Whether this is unambiguously true in Waugh's case - and on this the chairman of selectors Trevor Hohns declines to comment - his granting of an entire summer of farewell to international cricket is assuredly without precedent. Even Donald Bradman's parting spanned only three cheers and two deliveries.

Might it all be a bit hyperbolic? Not, it would seem, for those on the terraces.

While India have crashed Waugh's party somewhat this summer, he commences his 168th and final Test in Sydney on Friday as a genuinely demotic Australian figure. A roaring trade has been done in souvenir red rags, modelled on the lucky hanky that protrudes from Waugh's pocket in every innings, and his latest diary, Never Say Die, has sold in quantities even vaster than the preceding nine. When the third Test ended in victory for Australia early yesterday morning, the 29,300 in attendance flocked to the fences of the Melbourne Cricket Ground to pay their respects by cheers and tears.

Nor is this an overnight sensation. Even on his Test debut on the same ground and against the same opponents as a callow 20-year-old on St Stephen's Day 1985, Waugh cut an arresting figure. His first captain in Sheffield Shield cricket, Geoff Lawson, remembers his precocity both in skill and self-assertion: "He wanted to dominate at everything. He still does."

This air of composure fitted well into the improving but inconsistent Australian side led by Allan Border until March 1994. Border recalls a long conversation with Waugh on Australia's 1995 Caribbean tour, more than a year after his retirement. When they called it a night, Waugh commented that they had never really talked while playing. "I've been waiting for this conversation for 10 years," he said. Border realised it was true: "Frankly, from the very start of his career, it always seemed as though he didn't need much help. Even as a young bloke, although he sometimes struggled a bit, he always looked in control."

No single cricketer exerted the same influence on Waugh as Border. He offered him his first significant specialist responsibility, that of bowling the closing overs during Australia's successful 1987 World Cup campaign. He pushed Waugh into a key batting role in England in 1989, where he made his first two Test centuries.

It is to the disappointments he experienced with Border's team - the Ashes defeat in 1986-7, three unsuccessful series against the West Indies - that he's had recourse when motivating his current XI.

One of the formative partnerships of Waugh's life was 10 years ago at Headingley when he batted most of the second day in partnership with his skipper.

"Batting with Border always make you concentrate that little bit extra," Waugh wrote in one of his diaries, "because you can see how much it means to him to give his wicket away."

Border was 175 and Waugh 144 at the close but the former surprised the latter by batting for almost another hour on the third morning, adding another 40 runs, to bring about England's "mental disintegration". "It was a phrase I'd picked up in 1989 from Carl Rackemann," Border recalls. "And it made sense to me. I thought: 'They'd be expecting us to declare and this'll unsettle them. They'll be wondering when they're going to bat. When I declare, the openers'll have to rush to get the pads on. Makes it just that bit tougher for them'."

England were 195 for seven by stumps and had been routed by an innings and 148 runs before lunch on the fifth day. "Mental disintegration" is the expression Waugh has since used to describe the psychological and verbal pressure his team exerts.

In some senses it was the end of Border's career that prepared for Waugh the role he would fill under Mark Taylor's captaincy: that of Australia's middle-order sentinel. By April 1995, after his Test best 200 at Antigua which wrested the Frank Worrell Trophy from the West Indies, he was rated the best batsman in the world. He would score a dozen centuries for Taylor in four years.

Waugh's cardinal virtues as a batsman were his concentration and insatiable hunger for runs. It was once a cliché that batsmen were vulnerable immediately after scoring centuries. Waugh's average Test hundred, inflated by almost half of them being undefeated innings, is an unparalleled 255. It has been contagious. "You have a look at this Australian side, no one gets out after getting a hundred," Lawson says. "They just set sail for big ones every time. That's Steve's influence."

Lawson enjoys telling the story of Waugh's record-breaking fifth-wicket partnership of 464 in 407 minutes with his twin Mark for New South Wales against Western Australia in December 1990: "It was the most sublime batting you've ever seen. McCabe at Trent Bridge stuff, against a quality attack including Terry Alderman and Bruce Reid."

But what Lawson recalls most clearly is the Waughs's response to his declaration at 601 for four. "Mark (229 not out) came in all smiles; Steve (216 not out) was not happy. He was changing next to me in the dressing-room and he started complaining, 'What did you do that for? What do we play for?' I was a bit taken aback, I can tell you, and I said, 'Well, we do have 600.' Steve said, 'We could have got 1,000'."

When Waugh succeeded Taylor in February 1999, his appointment reasserted an old Australian custom. The shrewd Taylor had been captain because he was the best captain; Waugh became captain because he was the best player. This had its benefits. The days when Taylor's indifferent batting form had hogged headlines from his team's triumphs were no more. But there were costs: Waugh's captaincy, at least to begin with, was vested in his own bat.

That bat, by then, was a broad one. His Test average had bloomed from 36 to more than 50 in the six preceding years. But when Australia drew Test and one-day series in the West Indies that they had been expected to win easily and then went to the brink of exiting the 1999 World Cup, Waugh looked vulnerable. "My impression of Waugh's early captaincy is that he did things pretty much by numbers," says the former Australian Test player John Inverarity, now a university lecturer in leadership. "It was cold, it was sterile and it inspired no one."

Possibly Waugh's least distinguished moment was when he told his team to inch to victory over the West Indies at Old Trafford in an unsuccessful effort to exclude New Zealand from the World Cup's Super Six stage. He was contemptuous of criticism: "We're not here to win friends, mate."

At that stage, not all was well in the Australian camp. Shane Warne was seen by some as a better candidate for the captaincy; and that "some" might, on occasions, have included Warne himself. The radio broadcaster Tim Lane had a taste of Waugh's temper at Headingley when he struck a nerve with a story in Australia that Warne was not enamoured of his captain's leadership. Lane attended the usual practice doorstop hoping to solicit Waugh's response privately. Instead, he heard the captain respond to a question about the captaincy from one of the journalists with a vehement: "Who's responsible for that fuckin' bullshit?" When Lane confessed, Waugh excoriated him, calling Warne over and demanding his support. "I think he honestly believed I'd come up with a cock-eyed story, which naturally enough I don't agree with," Lane recalls. "But it was quite disturbing. For a while, I was very shaken."

If Waugh was shaken, he declined to show it publicly. After defeat by Pakistan at Headingley, Australia could not afford to lose again - and did not. When the Australians returned to Leeds for their last Super Six game, the captain won it off his own bat, with an undefeated 120 from 110 deliveries. The innings, and Australia's rout of Pakistan in the World Cup final at Lord's a week later, were the making of Waugh's captaincy career. Having always been identified with triumph by resilience, he became associated with victory by attack.

Admirers have grown over the past four years, especially of the game plan that Australia has made its own, characterised by ever speedier scoring rates, through 2001 (3.8 per over), 2002 (4) and 2003 (4.1), and the prosecution of results, so successful that Waugh has led Australia in only six drawn Tests. Victories have been achieved with crushing completeness. Defeats, suffered mainly from positions of immense strength, have been, in some instances, even more spectacular, from Calcutta and Headingley in 2001 to St John's and Adelaide in 2003.

Strategy, however, has been only part of the story. Less definable is the effect of Waugh's own stature on his team-mates.

"One of the key aspects of captaincy is the effect that the leader's presence has on the performance of his players," says Inverarity. "And a lot of players do seem to do better for Waugh's presence in the side, so he ranks highly by that measure. They feel supported by him, inspired by him, want to be like him."

One example of this is Waugh's popularisation among publishers of the cricketer's diary. Waugh has published 10 in as many years and believes the discipline has helped his game. As a result many have followed: Glenn McGrath, Adam Gilchrist and Ricky Ponting have all recently given their versions of the 2003 World Cup.

When Waugh guested at Kent for a few games during the 2002 season he struck up a friendship with Ed Smith and urged him to keep a diary. It will be published this year.

Another example is the famous interest in foreign cultures that Waugh evinces. Again, this began as a method of optimising performance. "Teams get into trouble overseas when all they do is sit around in their hotel rooms," Waugh has said. "You've got to enjoy touring or it's going to become a chore. I really think that's been the secret of my success away from Australia, that I've learned to go out and enjoy the places I've been, which means that you're not so focused on how homesick you are or what your form is like."

Under Waugh, Australia became known not merely as the best team in cricket but as the toughest. One of his favourite lines concerned it being "called 'Test' cricket for a reason"; that is, designed to "test" players in all respects, including mentally.

To questions about "sledging", he responded usually by saying that it was talked about "far too much", and that its significance was exaggerated. "It's not going to affect the good players and the players who won't do that well you don't need to bother about," he has suggested.

These convictions did not make him popular, but they were at least genuine, originating in a temperament that was at its best when the contest contained needle.

It is Waugh's capacity for being himself, in fact, that Border considers his greatest strength.

"Steve captains the way he plays," says Border. "He tries to win from the first ball. He's always respected his baggy green cap and been conscious of his place in history - now, so are his players. You only have to see the way he's always taking a stump or a ball or a bail as a souvenir after a game. History is something that matters to him."

That Waugh is about to become part of history himself does, to Border, signify the end of an era. Waugh emerged from Australian cricket at the dawn of professionalisation, before the Academy, before the game's pervasion by specialist coaches, psychologists and video analysis. He is the apostle of self-reliance in an age that, to some, seems to be ceasing to value it.

"Steve, he's a throwback to the old way, the last bloke of that old era," says Border.

It may be that, far from exaggerating Waugh's importance, the scale of his farewell underestimates him. His retirement does not merely involve the eclipse of an eminent cricketer but of a whole way of approaching and playing the game.