Australia cricketer Will Pucovksi’s promising career is coming to an early end due to medical reasons. According to 9News, the 26-year-old Pucovski will retire from all forms of cricket on the basis of recommendations made by a panel of medical experts.
In his brief career so far, which has seen him represent Australia in a lone Test match, Pucovski has suffered a series of head injuries which has led to concussions. The latest one which he suffered in a Sheffield Shield match in March seems to have been the clincher as he hasn’t featured in a game since. It led to Pucovski withdrawing from a County stint with Leicestershire as symptoms from the head blow continued to exist even in the month of May.
According to 9News, the medical team recommended their decision three months ago but have left it for CV and Pucovski to make the announcement. According to the channel, the opener hasn’t been part of Victoria’s pre-season camps and is believed to be overseas currently.
This wasn’t the first time a medical panel has examined Pucovski’s struggles. In 2022, a panel had found some of his injuries were “not true concussions” and more likely related to stress or trauma responses. Earlier this year even the player had admitted that since he was so used to the symptoms regularly, he had got used to them.
“I sort of link the mental-health stuff back to my first concussion…which was when I was about 15 or 16,” Pucovski had told the Vic State Cricket podcast in February. “I have a lot of concussion symptoms that over a seven or eight year period, actually never subsided. You just sort of got used to having them in a way. The brain’s pretty amazing and can find ways to adapt. I would fail concussion tests in the exact same way every single time, regardless of whether I had been hit in the head, and that was over a seven or eight year period,” Pucovski explained of his struggles.
Earlier this year, when he made a comeback after suffering a concussion and scored a century, his name was doing the rounds for a national comeback. And Pucovski admitted a better understanding of his concussions and mental health. In 2019, he had taken a break from cricket because of mental health reasons and did so again in 2022.
Immediately after the blow — which was his 13th since 2018 – Cricket Victoria (CV) had called for medical assessment. In May this year, when CV put out its annual contract list, it included Pucovski’s name in it, but a final decision was supposed to be taken by the medical experts. According to reports from Down Under, the medical team which included representatives from CV, Cricket Australia and independent experts have recommended Pucovski to stop playing cricket because of the head injuries, especially after his symptoms stayed long after the match in Hobart.
