Ballance break for ‘personal reasons’
ENGLAND batsman Gary Ballance yesterday withdrew from Yorkshire’s Royal London One-Day Cup match against Durham and has been granted time off for personal reasons.
The county captain will miss an unspecified number of matches, with Yorkshire asking for his privacy to be respected. Steven Patterson will captain the side in his absence.
The club said: “Captain Gary Ballance is set to miss several Royal London OneDay Cup fixtures after the club this week granted him some time away from the game due to personal reasons.”
Ballance, who was absent from yesterday’s 142-run One-Day Cup win over Durham, also missed the recent County Championship match against Surrey because of what was reported to be illness.
Yorkshire were led in that game by England captain Joe Root.
The domestic schedule is dominated by the One-Day Cup in the coming weeks, with the Tykes’ Championship campaign not resuming until June 20.
Ballance, who has 23 Test caps, was recalled by England for last summer’s series against South Africa but lost his place after breaking a finger. He was an unused member of the Ashes Test squad last winter and was dropped for the March series in New Zealand.
Meanwhile, former England batsman James Taylor has revealed the terrifying extent of the heart problems which forced his retirement in 2016 at the age of 26, and could have claimed his life. He has written about the day his symptoms arrived in dramatic fashion in his new autobiography Cut Short.
Having pulled out of a match against Cambridge University feeling ill and with a rapidly beating heart, he headed home to Nottingham and ended the day in hospital with a crushing diagnosis. “Just a few weeks earlier I’d been scoring runs and taking miracle catches for England in South Africa. Now I was a hunched, grey, hollow figure on the verge of death,” Taylor wrote.
“By 4pm, I was feeling progressively worse and getting pains down my left arm. Looking back, it’s obvious – it’s the sign of a heart attack. I shouldn’t have been alive at that stage.
“With my body concentrating all it had on my vital organs, my stomach was already giving up.”
Having been assessed by doctors, the extent of Taylor’s problems were put in horrifying perspective.
“The machine said the heart was pounding at 265 beats a minute,” he said.
“When the heart is under stress it releases an enzyme called troponin. Under no stress, the amount of troponin in the blood would be zero. My level was 42,000. Not surprisingly, at that point they concluded I’d had a severe heart attack. My sheer fitness had saved me. Anyone else wouldn’t have had a chance.
“The day, my heart, the future – there were so many unanswered questions, so much to deal with. It was the first time I’d ever felt real fear. Raw unbridled fear.”