‘People were not sensitive enough to my injuries’ – Ravi Ashwin on contemplating retirement between 2018 and 2020

Veteran Indian off-spinner Ravi Ashwin mentioned that thoughts of retiring from the game crossed his mind plenty of times during the phase from 2018-2020. Back then, Ashwin wasn’t a part of India’s ODIs and T20I teams after going out of contention in 2017. The Tamil Nadu-born tweaker had to miss quite a few Test matches as well due to various reasons.

Injuries at regular intervals took a toll his body and didn’t make things easy for him either. The 35-year-old cricketer said that he didn’t get enough backing when he was going through a rough phase in his career because of injuries.

The only person I would be talking to was my wife, says Ravi Ashwin

“I contemplated retirement for a lot of reasons. I felt like people were not sensitive enough to my injuries. I felt like a lot of people were backed, why not me? I have done no less. I have won a lot of games for the team.

“I don’t usually look for help, that somebody needs to back me, that somebody needs to cushion me or give me empathy. I felt I was not being able to be excellent and felt I needed a shoulder to lean on,” Ashwin said on Cricket Monthly.

Ashwin went down the memory lane to the 2018-19 Border Gavaskar Trophy where he sustained a Grade 3 abdomen muscle tear during the Adelaide Test. It was one of the many stages when Ashwin felt like hanging his boots from the sport.

“Just after the England series in 2018, after Southampton, was one phase. Again, in Australia later that year where I tore my abdomen after the Adelaide Test, before and after Sydney. Many stages. The only person I would be talking to was my wife. But my father was hell-bent: you will make a comeback in white-ball cricket, and I will see that before I die,” he added.

After the tumultuous phase in his career, times have changed for Ashwin in 2021. In the T20 World Cup 2021, he made his comeback to limited-overs cricket after a gap of four years. He was also impressive in the two-match Test series against New Zealand that India won 1-0 after their victory in the Mumbai Test.