"A couple of times he said to me I want to give up cricket and I said to him, 'But Reece you are so good at it and you haven't had the best chance," Julia, Reece's mother, said. ©Getty
Reece Topley's first professional game of cricket after his recovery from a fifth - yes, fifth - stress fracture of the back was a T20 Blast match between Sussex, his new county, and Hampshire in mid-summer, 2019. It was nearly a year since he had undergone an operation to insert metal screws in his vertebrae, surgery that was the final option in trying to salvage his career.
That game against Hampshire marked Topley's final crack at professional cricket. In five years, he had gone through more pain and anguish than most players ever have to face and by his own admission he wouldn't have been able to do it all over again. This was it, the last throw of the dice.
Topley's parents, Julia and Don, were in the Hove crowd that balmy July evening. They had watched their son go through this terrible run of injuries, desperately wishing that they could make things better but, of course, unable to do so. "They were hard days," Don, a former Essex bowler and Zimbabwe coach, says. "Some difficult, dark days for him. But some darks days for us as parents as well." Don remembers a call from Reece on the morning he found out he had a second stress fracture. "He was devastated. I had always had the answer for all his cricket questions. But when he told me that, I just didn't know what to say."
That feeling of hopelessness was a constant companion for Julia and Don throughout Reece's run of injuries. They tried to support him as best as they could but it broke their hearts to see what he was going through. At times, Reece tried to protect them too. "Sometimes with Reece, he was masking how much pain he was in," Julia says. "He kept having to have injections in his stomach and I knew nothing of that as his Mum. And it's probably a good job I didn't because I would have been so frightened for him."
The fifth stress fracture was more of an emotional rollercoaster than the previous ones, the tension heightened because of how much was riding on it. Julia took Reece to the Wellington Hospital, next to Lord's, for his operation and picked him up the next day. "It was so horrible," she says. "Just horrible. It could have been the end of his career." Don was running a school tournament with 200 kids the day of the operation. "I couldn't think of anything else," he says. "I would get quite emotional about it and hide in the loo. I was trying to put a brave face on it but all I could think about was my poor lad having his back opened up."
Topley's recovery was spent at the family home on the Essex-Suffolk border. "I was really worried about him," Julia says. "Reece has always played cricket and I am not sure whether at that time he had a plan B. Everything was up in the air. I was really worried, but not overtly so. I didn't let him know I was worried about that. I just tried to be supportive and take his mind off cricket. It was trying to be as normal as possible and just focusing on his health.
"A couple of times he said to me I want to give up cricket and I said to him, 'But Reece you are so good at it and you haven't had the best chance. Your body has let you down'. It was just giving him supportive feedback and allowing him to mull it over in his own mind without being too influential. I would have been gutted if he hadn't given himself one more chance."
In the end, Topley resolved to have one final go at his career because of the talent he felt he had for bowling quick. Cricket is not the be all and end all for him. He has a vast array of other interests. But he felt that he had proved that he could influence games in a positive way - his record certainly backs that up - and that he needed to try and take his talent as far as it could go. "I wouldn't still be playing cricket if I didn't feel like I could tear it up," he said as Cricbuzz
