Rising above the occasion for England as they demolished India with the best-ever figures for a bowler in ODIs for England, was 28-year-old Reece Topley. The pacer's scalps included both the India openers and Suryakumar Yadav, before dismissing tail-enders Mohammed Shami, Yuzvendra Chahal and Prasidh Krishna.
At the post-match press conference, Topley was unable to keep his emotions in check. “It means a lot... It makes it all worthwhile, to be honest. It was just over that stand that I had surgery three years ago,” he said, pointing towards the Wellington Hospital.
“It’s everyone’s dream to play for England and I just want to pull on the shirt as often as I can,” he added.
Having made his debut at 21, Topley's career trajectory was in the right direction before a string of injuries almost pushed him to the brink of premature retirement. By the age of 25, the pacer had already suffered his fourth stress fracture in five years. Unable to fight the pain, retirement at the tender age of 25 seemed the best option.
“Just to bowl I was having to inject myself every day with a hormone in my stomach and once a month I had to come up to London to get an anaesthetic put in my back and then I would have to go to the gym for an hour before I bowled just to prepare everything because I was playing with a crack in my back. I reached the point where I couldn’t be bothered to go through it anymore because I was in so much pain,” he told Telegraph.co.uk in an interview last year.
But instead, Topley took a year’s sabbatical. He found his peace in music and friends. The Englishman worked on his drumming skills and also learned to play the ukulele, a small, guitar-like instrument. But after the Covid pandemic, Topley found his peace in academics.
The pacer enrolled in a year-long microeconomic course at the University of California. Time away from the game made him more mature, and now, he talks like a philosopher, an example of the same came after the third T20, “One day it doesn’t go your way and you’re the villain and you have to get yourself up for the next game to try and be the hero.”
His maturity was clear when he reiterated that rushing himself back after an injury is not ideal, “When I’ve been injured so much, you’d almost bite someone’s hand off to play a T20 and bowl four overs for 40-something. It’s almost like, at least I’m out there. It’s not like I haven’t got a competitive instinct, it’s just I’m very realistic about things now, and very level-headed... That’s the perspective that I’m pretty lucky to have stumbled upon really,” he said after a game against the West Indies last year.
