Health and family take priority over cricket for Atapattu

Marvan Atapattu, the injured Sri Lankan captain, has put his health and family ahead of his career in order to live a pain-free life after years of cricket. The rigours of international cricket have taken its toll on his 35-year-old frame, with his spinal cord being especially badly affected.

"The back injury was there since I was young. It came and went and wasn't a major concern," Atapattu confirmed. "What I used to do was to take a couple of injections and carry on since I was 20. It wasn't a real problem. It triggered in a bad way in India and that was very bad.

"In Australia during the VB Series I had to take an injection in almost every state and had to go for MRI scans. It didn't look like working and there was no progress," he added. "It came to a stage where I had to decide whether I am going for surgery. The doctors diagnosed a disc pro lapse, that means the disc is jumping out from the spinal cord and touching the sciatic nerve that runs down my leg. I had to make a decision whether to do surgery and I knew surgery meant that I would be out for a couple of months."

It was at this point that Atapattu turned his thoughts away from cricket and underwent a micro-disc hectomy. "I thought of putting my health in front more than anything else. I thought this is enough as it was a vital time of my life," he said. "I had to give everything back to the family. It was about living a comfortable, pain-free life after the years of cricket. I had to take that decision along with the family."

Atapattu went under the knife and surgeons removed disc material that was touching the troubled nerve. "The doctor said that three months after surgery I will have a chance of playing again. Now it is almost three months. When I saw him last on June 19, he said I was six months away from playing cricket. It's a gradual process. You've got to do things slowly. If you go fast, you will fall back to zero again and all the symptoms come back."

Atapattu admitted that he was feeling much better now than when he last played for Sri Lanka in March. "If it gets to me again I know how tough it is," he said. "We are doing all things possible to strengthen the muscle. I would like to try something away from the international level in a warm-up game perhaps to test my fitness level. It's not like fielding ten balls which we do at practice. It's going to be for three-and-a-half hours and you've got to be 100%. There are no half measures.

"All these years you have been wanted by the public, team-mates and the selectors. I don't want to create a situation where people don't want you, but you just want to hang on. I guarantee I won't do that."