A news website has revealed top ten injuries of cricket players across the world Andre Nel, bless him, has managed to put himself out of action in comical fashion. He was walking through a door, or rather in the general direction of a door, but clonked his left elbow on the door frame, rupturing the lateral collateral ligament near the joint. He so badly injured himself that he will need surgery in the next fortnight. At No 9 is Tony Greig, the former England captain, who once missed a Test because he got a crick in his neck shaving. It was suggested that the hotel mirror was too low for the 6ft 7in Greig. At No 8 is Nasser Hussain, who was given the nickname “poppadum fingers” for the ease with which he fractured digits, but it was a fractured wrist while playing tennis in 1990 that earns him his place in the list. He was on his first England tour as a 21-year-old and, rather than stay and be bored in his hotel room in Guyana as the second Test was washed out, decided to pop out and play tennis. The court was slippery, Hussain slipped and snap went his wrist. He played in the fourth and fifth Tests despite the injury, showing early signs of his famous toughness.
At No 7 comes Jimmy Adams, the West Indies batsman, who had a bizarre in-flight bread-slicing accident during the tour to South Africa in 1998-99. On a flight to Johannesburg, Adams was making a sandwich and somehow sliced through the tendons of his right hand. Dr Ali Bacher, the South African administrator, was summoned and found Adams lying unconscious with blood pouring out of his hand.
No 6 is Chris Old, of Yorkshire, who was well known as a hypochondriac. It was said that if you asked him how he was, his reply would take half an hour. But sometimes the injuries were genuine: Old once missed a match through the unusual means of sneezing too hard and snapping a rib.
No 5 is Derek Pringle, who has always maintained indignantly that the story of him hurting his back writing a letter was boloney. It was actually more silly than that: during the 1982 Headingley Test, Pringle was stuffing an envelope with complimentary tickets for friends when he leant back on his chair, overbalanced and sprained his shoulder muscles.
We couldn’t get to No 4 without mentioning Chris Lewis. The England all-rounder arrived in Antigua for a Test series in 1994 and, thinking the temperature too warm, asked Devon Malcolm to shave his scalp. That was fair enough, but Lewis then caught sunstroke by fielding without any protection. The Sun dubbed him “the prat without a hat”.
No 3 surely has to be Shoaib Akhtar. The Pakistan fast bowler has missed matches for various reasons, but his cricket board was perhaps too candid when revealing why he was left out of the World Twenty20 squad this year. The board put out a press release telling the world that their star player was suffering from genital warts. He considered suing the board for the embarrassment.
At No 2 we have dear old Ted Dexter, who was once hit by a car, his own car. Dexter’s Jaguar ran out of petrol on the Great West Road in West London in 1965, so he decided to push it to the nearest garage. Unfortuately, Dexter lost control of the car and it rolled back, pinning him against a factory gate and breaking his right leg.
The man who tops our list, however, is Bruce French, the former England wicketkeeper and one of the most accident-prone players. He once missed a game after getting chicken pox from his daughter, on another occasion he was bitten by a dog, but the most memorable calamity was on England’s tour to Pakistan in 1987-88.
French was strolling by the nets as England were practising when he was struck on the head by a ball thrown in by a spectator. French was taken to hospital and as he was entering the building, he was struck by a car. The wound was stitched and French got up to return to the fray, only to crack his head on a low-hanging light fitting. Strangely for such an accident-prone man, one of French’s hobbies is mountaineering.
