Posted by Heather Knight’s year began with an Ashes defeat in which England lost every match. It then progressed to losing the captaincy, after which she utterly knackered one of her legs. Never mind taking a step forwards, a sidestep would have been nice. (Not that she’d have been capable with that hammy.)
Some wondered whether Knight would continue in international cricket after losing the captaincy. At 34, she’s an age where retirement wouldn’t seem silly. She didn’t want to retire though – and fair enough. She’s still young enough that she can recover from serious injuries in double-quick time, after all.
Knight returned to the England side earlier this month after coming a cropper against the West Indies in May.
“That was a pretty awful day to be honest. I felt my hamstring rip off. That was not that fun.”
Eesh. Despite never having torn a hamstring off the bone ourself, we’re not inclined to disagree with that assessment.
Knight suffered a tear in the same leg in 2013, so she’s always been wary. A month before it went this last time, she’d told England’s physios her hammies were in “the best place that they felt for a long time.”
Imagine how deflating that must have been. Being post-captaincy must already have felt like entering the outro of her career (and youth) and now her body had not just let her down, it had done so in a slightly grisly way that seemed designed to make her worry about specific frailties.
Knight opted against surgery because it would have ruled her out of the World Cup. However, that sort of piquant ambitious impatience isn’t necessarily the best mindset for recovering from something like this.
As England Women’s National Lead for Physiotherapy, Angela George, put it to S Sudarshanan of Cricinfo, Knight was always keen to push on, but, “… we were always able to justify our decisions that fundamentally, the body needed to heal and put that part of the tendon back onto the bone.”
Persuasive stuff. You definitely want your tendons affixed to the relevant bones rather than just flapping about in their pointlessly.
Vindication for George on that count, but so too on her assessment that Knight, “would not need an awful lot of game-time to get back to her very best.”
So far in her career, Knight has scored two hundreds in 14 Tests, which is exceptional. She has a T20 hundred to her name as well – a feat that is always remarkable and more so when it completes the triple-format set. Her ODI hundred record is oddly nondescript though. Before today she had only scored two centuries in 153 appearances.
Now it’s three and this one also means England have already qualified for the semi-finals with two group games still to go.
Hamtastic.
Why not get King Cricket articles by email? Seems like it would make your life easier and, dare we say it, better.
In a world where laboured portmanteau word based puns are striving to take over the planet by populating large language models through brute force, I’m not sure which of yours is the scariest: “Knightmare” or Hamtastic.
“Knightmare” only works in writing, of course, so requires “puntuation marks”.
Hamtastic is a pun that has been strained towards or even beyond breaking point…which I suppose makes it especially relevant in the context used.
There seems to be some confusion over whether Heather tore a hamstring muscle or had detached hamstring tendons. Those are quite different injuries. It would be possible to write a whole novel about Heather’s recent injury saga, which, if the latter type, should be called, “Tendon Is the Knight”.
That is… Words fail me. Meanwhile, I though Knight was like a bull in the Heather.
I didn’t actually. I don’t know what that means.
I *did* think that Bangladesh were going to win a game entirely in singles. They nearly did. But it looks like accelerating only for the last five overs is hard.
A great match though, it had that quality where it’s getting so tense you want it to be over, except at the same time you don’t. And a great tournament for close chases. Would be good if the chasing side wins one next.
And now I’m getting confused with DLS in SA – Pakistan. SA scored 312 in a reduced innings of 40 overs. Pakistan’s 40 over target was then calculated at… 306. Then when their innings was reduced to 20 overs, 234.
They got nowhere near, so it hardly mattered. But still
The lower target for Pakistan makes sense because the Saffers were a below par 6/1 off 2 overs when they expected to have a full 50.
A partial answer to the question “what is a duck worth to the bowling side in a rain affected match”, the stern answer to which is, “it depends, Mr Lewis, it depends”. But for sure it is worth something towards a reduced target.
Thanks for the methodical reply, Ged. I am now entangled in the relevant Wikipedia page and making some progress towards understanding. I know a very similar case in December 2014 when Sri Lanka were also 6-1 after 2 overs before a rain interruption, and England’s target adjusted downward thereafter.
In sum, you live and learn;