How will you spend your £1.5m, Tymal?
A horror back injury almost finished Tymal Mills. Now he’s off to earn millions in the IPL
TYMAl MIllS was on his own in a Dubai hotel room when he switched on the TV to discover his life had changed for ever.
‘It was unbelievable to watch,’ says the young Sussex bowler who became a millionaire as he tuned in to the Indian Premier league auction.
‘I went silent. My best mate — Tom Craddock (former Essex legspinner) — had got up at 3.30am in England to watch the draft with me on FaceTime and he went silent too.
‘I was gawping at the TV. We’d watched Ben Stokes go for big money and been joking about my chances but then it was like, “God”. The hammer came down at 1.8m US, or whatever, and my phone never stopped ringing.’
It was the moment Royal Challengers Bangalore decided to spend close to £1.5m on a 24year-old late developer who only played his first game of cricket 10 years ago and made him one of their biggest IPl buys.
For Mills, who just two years ago was forced to consider retiring because of a mystery back condition, it was also the moment an incredible journey from a small town in Suffolk had taken a remarkable twist.
‘Never in my wildest dreams did I think something like that could happen,’ says the man who had entered the auction at the lowest base price of £60,000, so keen was he to get an IPl gig.
‘I’d spoken with a few people and we knew there was decent interest from various teams but this was well beyond anything we thought possible.
‘It’s life- changing, absolutely. Provided I stay fit I’m guaranteed 80 per cent of that money and then the last 20 is pro rata depending on how much you play. So that’s an amazing amount and it means I can buy a house mortgage-free and help my mum and little sister out. It just sets everything up for the rest of my life.’
What a story Tymal Mills is and what a reward. This is for a man who, at 13, would rise at 3am to work on market stalls in Brandon before school to help his single mother who had made a new life away from her native Yorkshire.
And it is a story that could easily have had another, far less happy ending if the congenital back condition that blighted his early career had forced him out of the game, as looked distinctly possible early in 2015.
‘ I certainly wouldn’t have thought this was possible when I was sat in the boardroom over there,’ he says at the Hove ground he now calls home, pointing at a small room at the top of a stand.
‘Mark Robinson (then Sussex coach), Zac Toumazi, the chief exec, and doctors and physios were all there going through my situation and I was struggling to play cricket at all.
‘I had such a peculiar injury that the doctors didn’t really have anything to compare it with. They diagnosed it as best they could and spoke with people around the world. They laid out my options and we planned it from there.’
One of those options was the dreaded ‘R’ word.
‘ I’ve always tried to stay positive but that day in the boardroom when the word retirement was spoken was a bad one,’ says Mills. ‘I was 22 and to have that said and for that to be a possibility was not nice.
‘They gave me time to go away and think about it. I never wanted to retire. I always wanted to give it another go. If the injury had come back it might have been different but I’m happy with the option I took to play just Twenty20.
‘I missed the first T20 game that year but a few days later I played here against Gloucester and I was very nervous before bowling my first ball. My injury has only ever happened during a game when I’ve slammed my front foot down and got shocks around my waist and legs but the first ball was fine, I went on to take three wickets and it was a massive weight off my shoulders.’
From there the only way has been up as Mills has become the epitome of the very modern Twenty20 specialist, first doing well with Sussex and this winter already playing in Australia, New Zealand, Bangladesh and Dubai in the Pakistan Premier league, where he received the big news from India.
But it was three matches he played against India for England earlier this year following a promising debut against Sri lanka last summer that brought Mills to the attention of the Indian franchise world.
‘India was awesome,’ he says. ‘The crowds were big and they are fanatical. It was nice to play in Bangalore too because that’s my home ground now and it’s a difficult place to bowl. It’s a pretty small ground with a flat pitch so you have to temper your expectations and realise you’re not always going to take two for
‘Kohli’s six was definitely the best shot I’ve been hit for!’
23. The average score there is 200 I believe so there will be times when going for 30 to 35 will be a good day.’
And, in a star-studded Bangalore team that will include the likes of Chris Gayle and AB de Villiers, one of Mills’s new team-mates stands out. India captain Virat Kohli himself.
‘Virat never said a word to me when I was in India with England,’ Mills explains.
‘I’m looking forward to meeting him. He’s probably the best player I’ve ever bowled at and it gives you a marker for where you’re at. I can still see the six he hit back over my head in Nagpur off a pretty short ball. It was definitely the best shot I’ve ever been hit for!’
It is all a long way from Suffolk, where Mills only became interested in cricket as a sportsmad youngster when he watched the 2005 Ashes on TV.
‘Where I grew up, cricket wasn’t that big. It was only the private schools that really played,’ he says. ‘I messed about with mates and the 2005 Ashes was my first real experience of cricket. I watched it on TV and had a match with my mate’s team at 14 when they were short and enjoyed it.
‘They were games of 15 eight-ball overs but mine were often more because I was so erratic. I didn’t know what I was doing but I enjoyed it and didn’t think it would go anywhere. As I kept playing I got better, a bit more accurate, and I stood out because I could bowl fast.’
Not that a career in the game was certain throughout his teens and mum Louise wanted to make sure there was an alternative career for her son.
If injury had curtailed his cricket then Mills could easily have been writing in these pages rather than appearing in them as he excelled in a sports journalism degree at the University of East London.
‘I wasn’t signed professionally after I did my A-levels, I was just on a summer contract at Essex, and my mum was keen for me to go to uni and get a degree. It was life experience as much as anything. I did my first year at UEL and turned professional the next summer. Things then really accelerated.
‘I started the second year but I was away with cricket so I deferred it and then it all snowballed. I’m still grateful I did it. I got two years worth of student loans without a degree to show for it but I can pay that off now. ‘I still keep my hand in writing for local papers back home. I learned the basics in that first year, so I will try to keep that going.’ And Mills the writer will keep that going and bring his talent to Sportsmail next month when he pens a weekly diary of his experiences in the IPL.
When he is there he will be able to show a wider audience the leftarm pace delivered from a boxer’s physique that makes him one of the fastest in the world and which was to make his name when, playing for Essex in 2013, he struck Graeme Swann a nasty blow on the arm in a warm-up game against England and almost put him out of the Ashes.
Now, with his back condition meaning he concentrates solely on T20 — he will probably never bowl with a red ball again — it is his skilful, slower ball that provides just as difficult a test as the near 95mph bowling that did for West Indian superstar Gayle in a significant dismissal last year.
‘I’m lucky in that, where my game was two years ago, I was a much better bowler in T20 cricket than in the four-day game,’ says Mills. ‘I’d always struggled in the firstclass game with my consistency, trying to swing the ball and stuff like that. I was still learning, whereas the natural back of a length that I bowl was more suited to T20. My slower ball has helped me out a lot too.
‘That slower ball has served me well so far so I will keep trusting and backing it. It has added a weapon to my armoury. I’m lucky that I’m pretty flexible. Some guys who bowl slower balls out of the back of the hand have trouble getting their arm in exactly the same spot but I’m hyper-mobile so I can get my arm high and the other way round without any discomfort.’
As we talk near the pavilion at Hove during pre- season training the Sussex players file past us and Chris Nash, with a smile, shouts out: ‘ There’s the million-dollar man.’
It is ribbing that Mills enjoys but also knows it has a serious side.
‘I will try not to think of the price tag too much when I’m in India,’ he says.
‘I’m sure if I have a bad game people will be all over me but that’s how it is and I’m certainly not complaining. I’ve been bought to go out there and do a job and try to do what I’ve always done. I always back myself to do well.’
And then, when he returns, he will go house- hunting on the Sussex coast.
‘I do call Hove home,’ adds Mills. ‘It’s a great place to live, especially in the summer, and the boys and staff at Sussex have been great.
‘I moved here three years ago with expectations of playing all forms of cricket but that only lasted two games and throughout all the injury problems people were great. It would have been easy to park me off a bit but they have contracted me for 12 months and given me that little bit of security so I will be buying my house here. It’s nice to have somewhere to come back to.’
And, of course, Mills will treat his mum.
‘She has always been amazing and raised me and my sister on her own,’ he concludes.
‘She did everything for us and now I can do things for her and repay all those long days she spent providing for us. That’s the nicest thing to come out of this, really.’
‘I was 14 when I first played — after watching the 2005 Ashes’