Aaron Finch may have played his last game for Australia with his team's Twenty20 World Cup exit and long-term schedule raising questions about the future of the country's most prolific limited-overs batsman.
Finch and the rest of Australia's team watched on from Adelaide on Saturday night as England ended their World Cup, limping home to a four-wicket win in the last over against Sri Lanka to qualify for the semi-finals.
Even if Australia had reached the final four there was no guarantee Finch would have played, given he missed Friday night's scratchy four-run win over Afghanistan with a hamstring injury.
But now there is even more uncertainty around the 35-year-old's future.
Australia's next T20 series is almost 10 months away, with three games scheduled against South Africa at the end of next August.
The opener insisted when he announced his retirement from one-day cricket in September that he had not yet considered his future in the T20 format.
If Finch has played his last game for Australia, he will be remembered as one of the country's finest white-ball batsmen.
The right-hander is Australia's leading run-scorer in T20 international cricket with 3120 to his name, while his average of 34.28 is the best of any Australian with more than 1000 runs.
Monday night's 63 against Ireland took him past 9500 international runs in white-ball cricket, a feat only previously achieved by Ricky Ponting and Adam Gilchrist.
As a captain Finch should also be celebrated for his tactical nous, regularly pulling the right rein with bowling changes and fields.
He helped Australia to their maiden T20 World Cup last year, and helped the team to the semi-finals of the 2019 one-day tournament out of the rubble of the ball-tampering saga.
With the bat he also starred in one-day World Cups, hitting a century to kick off Australia's successful campaign in 2015 before averaging 50.7 in 2019.
Teammate Glenn Maxwell backed him as a selfless player and captain.
"He would have loved to have been out there with us. He was awesome around the group ... supported us as hard as we could," Maxwell said after Friday's game.
"That's typical Aaron.
"He will never put his personal interests in front of everyone else's, he will never look for the limelight of, 'This show is about me' or anything.
"For him to say that he was still feeling it a little bit must have been a big decision for him, especially in a must-win game where he's coming off a bit of form.
"He was hitting the ball really well and that must have been a really hard decision for him but credit to him, he didn't want to hinder in the field in any way."
