The first back injury

With commitments to the New Zealand side, New Zealand’s domestic season, and his county contract with Middlesex, Nash played a huge amount of cricket in 1995. On the one hand, it was an important phase in his development as a cricketer. "I loved the opportunity I got at Middlesex," Nash said. "It was certainly a learning experience for me and it was probably a real shame that I couldn’t fulfil my second year because that’s probably when it would have borne fruit for both me and Middlesex as well." But so much cricket also began to take its toll on Nash’s body. Nash followed up his season at Middlesex with New Zealand’s tour of India in October and November, but he was exhausted. He played three Tests and five One-Day Internationals on that tour, but Nash confesses that he had begun chucking as his weary body began to take short-cuts. It was a clear-cut case, Nash explains, of too much cricket in too short a period. Perhaps more critically, however, Nash was also beginning to pay the price for inadequate training.

Nash maintained his place in the national side through the New Zealand home season and the following tour of Pakistan in February-March 1996, but his back had become increasingly troublesome and he was never fully fit when New Zealand toured the West Indies in March. Nash was naturally frustrated, as he began to spend less and less time playing cricket and more and more time on the physio’s bench. Acute back pain kept him out of the two Tests, and he played only two one-day games while in the Carribean. That frustration surely offers a partial explanation for the alleged misbehaviour Nash, amongst others, apparently displayed towards coach and manager at that time, according to Glenn Turner’s controversial ‘expose’ of his tenure as coach. But, in any case, worse problems than run-ins with the team-management lay just around the corner for Nash.

Despite the pain in his back, Nash returned to Middlesex in mid-1996 for the second season of his two-year contract. Nash managed only two games for the county, however, before his mysterious back injury necessitated the premature termination of his contract on June 26. The situation was made even more painful for Nash because multiple scans and X-rays while in England had failed to diagnose Nash’s injury or even reveal any physical damage, and the British media hurtfully claimed that Nash’s problem was in his head, not his back. Only when Nash returned to New Zealand did tests finally reveal the nature of his back injury: he had stress fractures in his lower spine and his L5 disc had prolapsed, painfully pinching the surrounding nerves. Around the same time, Nash also lost the opportunity of financial security his first contract with New Zealand Cricket would have offered when he failed the requisite fitness test. After two solid years with the New Zealand Cricket Team, Nash suddenly found himself injured, unemployed, and his international career as good as over in the minds of many.

Stress fractures are essentially an overuse injury, which can be caused simply by playing too much cricket. Even the most technically-correct fast bowling is unnatural for the human body, as it repeatedly subjects the bowler’s body to extreme, twisting forces. Before his injury in 1996, Nash’s bowled with an awkward ‘mixed’ action, which meant, in essence, that he was bowling side-on with his feet and front-on with the top half of his body. His technical faults caused excessive twisting of his back when he bowled. Nonetheless, Nash’s injury could have been prevented with proper management and training, particularly of the abdominal muscles, which can be developed to counter the force of bowling and relieve the stress on the bowler’s back. Unfortunately for Nash, he did not receive adequate guidance either from New Zealand Cricket or at Middlesex, and suffered a serious back injury that really was "an accident waiting to happen".

"It hadn't been drilled home enough to me, as a professional, that I had to use what little down time I had doing rehab work on my muscles and back, rather than just taking the wear and tear day after day," Nash told sports journalist Margot Butcher after his comeback in 1998. Without vigilant guidance, he added, it was too easy for a young cricketer to view rest days as time off, rather than time to work on fitness. Compounding Nash’s problem was his youthful enthusiasm and natural eagerness to impress the selectors by playing every match he could. "I was a bit naïve," Nash explained. "My injury could have been prevented, both by training the muscles which I needed to protect the back area, and by managing the amount of bowling I was doing and my rest periods." Sadly, Nash was a victim of too much cricket and inadequate training, and the price he paid was two years of his international career.

Those two years were hard times for Nash, physically, mentally, and economically. Sometimes, he commented later, he found it hard simply getting out of bed in the morning. Nash described the mental process in New Zealand Sport Monthly’s feature on his comeback. He was not ready to accept the consensus view which suggested that he would never bowl again, but he fluctuated between optimism and resignation. "It was like breaking up a relationship. You go through different stages, ups and downs," Nash told Butcher. "Initially, I thought I would just get over it but, after a few months, I realised the injury was more serious. Then I got a bit ‘anti’. I thought maybe I should just flag it, forget playing cricket for New Zealand. But, almost as soon as my mind went there, I thought, ‘No!’."

Certainly, Nash was trying to think beyond cricket in the months following his injury in 1996. For one thing, he was now living in Auckland and had a mortgage to take care of. Without the income of a cricket contract, Nash sought other employment, but he found potential employers became skeptical when he confessed his ambitions to play cricket again and were unwilling to make offers. Instead Dion Nash, the wonder-boy of Lords in 1994, found himself working part-time in a bar. Meanwhile, Nash found he had a little more time on his hands to indulge his love of the beach. "I tried to become a surfie, but I found I wasn’t any good at that," he said on the Strassman talk show in 2001. Ultimately, however, Nash’s time on the sidelines and the unwelcome thought of working a nine-to-five job made him realise how much he loved playing cricket. "I know it's a cliche, but you don't realise what you've got until it's gone," Nash explained. "I didn't realise how much I loved cricket and loved being part of a team until I was sitting at home. Let me tell you, the beach in summer isn't all it's cracked up to be."

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[Retirement Feature]