The "retired out" dismissal, while sanctioned by the Laws of Cricket, has long been one of the sport's rarest events, with only a handful of notable instances in its history. The most famous and controversial case occurred in Test cricket in 2001, when Sri Lankan batters Marvan Atapattu and Mahela Jayawardene both retired out against Bangladesh after scoring big hundreds, a move widely criticized as unsporting. However, in recent years, the dismissal has become a more frequent tactical maneuver in the fast-paced world of T20 cricket. Bhutan's Sonam Tobgay was the first to be "retired out" in a T20 International in 2019, but the trend truly took off when India's Ravichandran Ashwin was strategically retired out in the IPL in 2022 to bring a faster-scoring batter to the crease. Since then, numerous other players in domestic and international T20 leagues have followed suit for similar reasons, including Namibian Niko Davin at the 2024 T20 World Cup, and a bizarre instance where all ten batters for the UAE side retired out against Qatar in a women's T20 World Cup qualifier in 2025. This growing list of "retired outs" highlights the evolving nature of cricket, where strategic efficiency in the T20 format is increasingly seen as a valid reason to use a dismissal that was once considered a violation of the game's spirit.
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