I’ve bulked up to get a shot at the Ashes
Pace ace MATTHEW FISHER has put injury nightmare behind him
IN the space of a month, Matthew Fisher went from realising a dream to suffering a nightmare. The Yorkshire bowler made his England Test debut in Barbados last March, taking a wicket with his second ball. However, in his first match back for his county in April, he sustained a stress fracture of the back that sidelined him until the final game of the summer.
Fisher’s fledgling career has been plagued by injury problems and in the past they have reduced him to tears.
But this time, buoyed by having been picked to play for his country, his spirits stayed high. He vowed to return stronger than ever with a clear instruction for Yorkshire’s strength and conditioning coach, Harry Booker.
‘I said to him, “I want you to make me look like an Australian fast bowler”,’ the 25-year-old says. ‘ Looking in a mirror, I just thought, “I don’t look as robust as some players I’ve seen”. Pat Cummins, Josh Hazlewood, Mitchell Starc, they all seem to look solid. So I was like, “Try and make me look like them”.
‘ I ate loads that first three months. I wasn’t bothered about what my skin folds (body-fat tests) were at that point.
‘It was just about trying to get as much in as I could so you can then build the muscle. I’ve gone from 86kgs to 91kgs and my skin folds are very similar, so it’s just muscle. I feel a lot stronger now. I look more like a man rather than a boy.’
It is not just Fisher’s physique that changed during his time away from the middle. He also tweaked his bowling action in a bid to prevent further serious injury — and did so by studying videos of the game’s greats.
‘If you improve every single part of your game then hopefully you are giving yourself the best chance of not getting injured,’ he adds.
‘In the first two weeks after my injury, I looked at so many different actions of some of the best bowlers to have ever bowled and thought, “How do I want mine to look?”. Richard Hadlee, Darren Gough, Kagiso Rabada, Dale Steyn, Brett Lee. I’ve got so many videos or stills on my phone from around that time.
‘I did it myself because you don’t want to have to go through a stress fracture again, you want to make your action safer. I want mine to look more like Anrich Nortje’s. Not because he’s rapid, but it’s his back foot contact that I’ve tried to model myself on.’
Fisher identified that his back foot was landing side- on rather than straight, which caused his feet to cross over and him to fall over, straining the left side of his back. Intriguingly, he believes it was his desire to swing the ball like his idol that led to the flaw. ‘ Because I love Jimmy Anderson, I was so obsessed about getting side-on to be able to swing it out a bit more that it turned me round and that’s where my feet cross-over came from,’ he explains. ‘It was actually me trying to model myself too much on Jimmy that got me in a worse position.’
Fisher has looked up to Anderson since he was a child, but it was the controversial decision to drop the record-breaking veteran and Stuart Broad from last year’s West Indies tour that saw him win his first England call-up. His debut still came as a shock, as he was drafted in on the morning of the second Test after Craig Overton fell ill. But taking the new ball on the second day, Fisher had John Campbell caught behind with just his second delivery. ‘The Test was brilliant and a dream come true,’ he says. ‘That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, to play Test cricket for England, so I really did take it all in and enjoy it. I remember everything about it. I don’t watch my wicket back because I can see it in my head. ‘To then come back and get the stress fracture, it was annoying, but I have been more down about other injuries before. The debut actually spurred me on and I thought, “I want to get back there again”. That is my biggest driving force because you never want to have just one cap.’
Watching England’s Bazball revolution from afar, Fisher saw Anderson, Broad and Matthew Potts selected as the seamers at the start of last summer, before Ollie Robinson and Mark Wood returned. Olly Stone is also on the upcoming Test tour of New Zealand and Jofra Archer is nearing a comeback ahead of this summer’s Ashes.
But Fisher, who took six wickets in his first match back for Yorkshire in September, remains in the selectors’ thoughts having been awarded a pace bowling development contract in October. He also toured the UAE with the Lions in November and is with them again in Sri Lanka, where they play their first match on Wednesday.
‘ Getting the fast bowling contract was a big confidence boost after being injured,’ Fisher says. ‘They obviously wanted to stick with me and back me.
‘If there are any injuries to the England bowlers that are in New Zealand, I’d like to think that I’d be in the conversation to be going there. There’s been indoor sessions where I am visualising bowling at David Warner, so the Ashes are definitely on my mind.
‘I can’t really control where I am in the pecking order, so for me it’s just about bowling well for Yorkshire. I know how fast it can happen. It happened last winter, so hopefully I’ll get another chance at some point. I have got the confidence that I know I can get back there.’