Birthday special: Craig Kieswetter – A promising career curtailed tragically

Cricket is a cruel game and some of the promising cricketers have been on the receiving end of its cruelty. England’s Craig Kieswetter was a confident and hard-working wicketkeeper-batsman and was often touted as the next big thing in England cricket. The man had impressive stats in both domestic and international circuit and could have emerged as a bright star in the cricket world but a traumatic injury sustained on the cricket field changed his life forever and he was forced to put a full stop on his professional career at the age of 27.

Heartbreaking pictures of Craig Kieswetter who suffered an eye injury in a domestic match. pic.twitter.com/xLLx7sL9Rq

— Manya (@CSKian716) June 5, 2015

At the age of 20, Craig made a tough call of shifting his base from South Africa to England to follow his passion of playing cricket. The batsman was soon spotted by County side Somerset and the lack of a strong wicket-keeper in the Somerset side gave Kieswetter an opportunity to play for them. He made his debut for Somerset in 2007 season and his heroics made him a regular member of the side. He was also adjudged the NBC Denis Compton Award, as the “most promising young player”, for Somerset.

Craig was picked in the England side in 2010 during a Bangladesh tour. On his debut, he opened the batting with Alastair Cook and scored 19 runs. He scored his maiden century in his third match, where he scored 107 runs. The wicketkeeper-batsman was then included in England’s squad for 2010 T20 World Cup where he had a decent run as he piled up 221 runs along with an important knock of 63 in the final.

However, Kieswetter’s career started dipping when he failed to live up to his reputation against Australia and Bangladesh and was eventually dropped out of the team. Since then he remained a back-up option for England as Jos Buttler was given preference as the potential wicketkeeper-batsman. However, Craig didn’t lose hope and continued performing for Somerset.

An unfortunate incident happened on July 12, 2014, while Craig was playing for Somerset against Northamptonshire in a County Championship that changed his life. David Willey was handed the ball and he delivered a bouncer which sneaked through the gap between Kieswetter’s helmet’s grip and visor and fractured his nose and cheekbone. Craig underwent a surgery and got his face restructured. Though he returned from the life-threatening injury to play cricket in county cricket but couldn’t do justice to the game as the injury had affected his vision.

Thus, Craig Kieswetter had to take early retirement from the game at the age of 27 after representing England in 46 ODIs and 25 T20Is collecting 1,054 and 526 runs respectively.