Following an unfortunate head injury to Nottinghamshire’s Luke Fletcher, England’s leading wicket-taker in Test cricket James Anderson has recalled a similar sort of an incident where he was at the receiving end of a ferocious shot from Aussie opener Matthew Hayden and barely managed to save himself from getting hit.
Anderson wrote about the incident on his column in The Telegraph and conceded that it was just a matter of time before it happened to someone and they were just praying that they weren’t at the receiving end. Fletcher was hit on his follow through during a T20 Blast game on Saturday at the Edgbaston Cricket Ground. After thorough check up in the ground, Fletcher was shifted to the Queen Elizabeth hospital and though he was discharged the next day, he had to return on Tuesday to undergo some further tests.
“It was sickening to watch Luke Fletcher being hit on the head by a ball smashed straight back at him. All the bowlers I have spoken to since seeing it have said that it was only a matter of time before it happened to someone and they were just praying it wasn’t them. I remember playing a Twenty20 game in Australia in 2007 and Matthew Hayden smacked one back at me. My head goes down as I follow through and as I looked up I just saw this white flash pass about an inch from the side of my head. If it had been a touch straighter I would not have had time to react and who knows what could have happened. That was a decade ago and since then the hitting in Twenty20 has become absolutely ridiculous,” Anderson wrote in his column.
The head injury also forced Fletcher to miss the rest of the season as he doesn’t have enough time to recuperate fully. The decision was taken after consultation with the doctors.
“Following consultation with doctors, Luke has been ruled out for the rest of the 2017 season to allow adequate time to recover and complete a monitored care plan to ensure he has a safe return to play,” Nottinghamshire’s director of cricket Mick Newell was quoted as saying by the ESPN Cricinfo.