Cricket great Chris Cairns on family tragedy, stroke, cancer, matchfixing claims – and his marriage

Former New Zealand cricketer Chris Cairns at the Botanics Sportsfield in Nelson. Photo / Corey Fleming

Kiwi cricket legend Chris Cairns has been through it all – from the highs of international stardom as one of the game’s great all-rounders to the lows of match-fixing allegations, a series of life-changing illnesses which left him in a wheelchair and, more recently, breaking up with his wife, Mel, after 13 years of marriage. In a frank and extensive interview, he talks to Mark Crysell about his life and his hopes for the future.

Nelson’s Victory Square is one of the oldest cricket grounds in the country – a pocket of New Zealand history hiding in plain sight. Cricket’s been played here since the 1850s. Back then, settlers planted spindly saplings along the boundary; today those same trees stand as stately oaks, giving the place just a hint of an English village green … right up until your eye catches the vape shops and tattoo studios on the far side of the road, which snap you neatly back to 2025.

But this morning – bright, crisp, late spring – the place feels suspended in time. The sun’s warming up, but there’s still dew on the outfield. And in the middle of it all is one of New Zealand’s greatest cricketing all-rounders.

Not running in. Rolling in.

Chris Cairns is home.

“It’s actually been good for the soul,” he says, guiding his wheelchair toward the centre wicket block, the tyres cutting two thin tracks through the damp grass behind him.

“I’ll turn around and I see my tyre tracks coming out to the field,” he says. “I know that I’ll never go into the net again and have a bat … or even do some throw-downs. I’ll go past a window, see my reflection as I’m wheeling myself down the street … and it shunts you a little bit.”

There is a before. And an after.

Cairns knows the date by heart.

“The life I knew before August 21st is no longer.”

August 21, 2021 – the day he collapsed at age 51 in his Canberra home with a torn aorta.

He has no memory of the frantic helicopter flight to Sydney. He later learned the crew almost didn’t take him because they didn’t think he’d survive the trip.

“I had multiple organ failures, and I was on dialysis, sepsis,” he says. “I was extremely close to death.”

Three open-heart surgeries saved his life. A spinal stroke left him paralysed from the waist down. The news didn’t land immediately. “When I was told about the spinal stroke, it didn’t really kick in,” he says.

Then it did.

“It dawned on me: the diagnosis, the situation I was in – in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. Because you’re a former professional athlete who was once one of the best in the world …”

But if bad luck comes in threes, Chris Cairns was about to get his hat-trick.

A few months later, a colonoscopy delivered a third shock: bowel cancer.

“The doctor who told me was more upset than I was,” he says. “He just went, ‘Oh, God.’ Like … really? Another thing?”

More surgery left him wearing a nappy for five months.

“That was probably the one thing that nearly broke me,” he says, “because I couldn’t really go anywhere. I didn’t want to embarrass others.”

A specialist in Sydney offered a solution that helped him feel human again: he lifts his shirt and shows his stoma, a small surgical opening in his abdomen.

“I got my life back,” he says. “I can go out when I want, eat what I like, drink what I like, be social again. It’s a big part of my life now, and I’m happy to talk about it. Because it’s given me so much back.”

Cairns has lived a life of extremes.

The son of cricketing folk hero Lance, he joined the Black Caps as a 19-year-old in 1989 – raw, powerful, touched with the same aura his father carried into stadiums.

One of the biggest turning points came four years later. His sister, Louise, was killed in a train collision in Rolleston in 1993.

“I never dealt with the death of my sister,” he says. “I just went straight back into cricket, and I never processed that at all.”

He clashed publicly with coach Glenn Turner. He was suspended for staying out until 4am before a test match. He spiralled.

“I just rebelled. Got on the piss. And really escaped – or tried to escape – what had actually occurred. Because I didn’t understand. So, for those three or four years through the whole Turner years and all that stuff, man, I was hard work.”

He grew into a matchwinner – at times the best all-rounder in the world. For a period, he held the world record for test sixes. He played like a man trying to bend the game to his will. And he often did.

But he knows what he was like.

“I just wanted to win,” he says. “I pushed myself. I pushed others. Sometimes it was tough.

“Was I an arsehole? Yeah. Probably. Did it bother me? No. Because I wanted to be the best in the world. I wanted that team to win. That was all that mattered.”

The brilliance came with a shadow. The match-fixing allegations out of India – backed by former Black Caps Lou Vincent and Brendon McCullum – followed him for years. Two court cases in London cleared him. The stain lingered anyway.

“Reputationally, I’m burnt,” he told reporters outside Southwark Crown Court.

Some still believe he was guilty.

“They’re entitled to their opinion,” he says now. “The court decisions are the facts. I don’t have to respond.

“It’s part of my life. It’ll always be there. But since August 21 … all that stuff before is just insignificant.”

But the hardest chapter may not have been the surgeries, the wheelchair, or the cancer. It was something quieter – something private.

“The main reason for me coming back to New Zealand was … Melanie and I separated,” he says. “This is the first time I’ve talked about it.”

His wife, Australian lawyer Melanie Croser, stood by him through allegations, trials, public scrutiny, near death, cancer. They built a family together.

“We went through an enormous amount as a couple,” he says. “And two years ago, we made a mutual decision to separate.”

Their three children live with Melanie in Melbourne. She has a new partner.

“She’s happy. The kids are great. I wish nothing but the best for her.”

His time is now split between Australia and New Zealand.

He stays with his mum in Blenheim and is helping E’stel, a local artesian water company, expand into India.

“It’s probably a little safety blanket to come back here but still back to Australia for my health care and the kids,” he says, “I’m rebuilding.”

After the separation and for the first time in his life, Cairns reached out and asked for help.

He speaks regularly with a Christchurch-based grief counsellor who works with military veterans: men trained to be tough, taught to endure, and then left to figure out how to live again.

“My focus is that simple line: it’s not what you endure, it’s how you endure,” he says.

It’s become a kind of mantra.

“The ‘what’,” he says, “that’s the cancer. The stoma. The loss of what I used to be able to do. Engage. Move. Live. Whatever.

“The ‘how’ – that’s getting out of bed. Making my bed. Going to the gym. Seeing my mates. Getting out of the house when I can.”

He knows he won’t nail it every day.

“Sometimes you’ll deviate, and you’ll feel sorry for yourself – and that’s okay,” he says. “But if you can zero back in on how you endure … that’s the bit that matters.”

The stubbornness matters. It always has. It’s what gets him out of bed each day. What drives him to lock in the high-tech knee brace, to line everything up before he moves – the chair, the crutches — the small rituals of defiance.

“So how do I do it?” he says, hauling himself upright, snapping the crutches into place. “I just make sure I’ve got what I need around me. The chair, the brace … these things. So I can still get where I want to go.”

He rises to his full 1.9m (6’3).

“It’s actually really nice because I’m usually staring at people’s navels these days,” he says.

Suddenly, he’s moving with crutches, faster than you expect, across the carpark, hopping gutters and cutting across uneven grass.

“With this on,” he says, leaning on the crutches and tapping the brace, “I’ve got options. I can get on to safer ground quicker. I’ve got more ways to move.”

He pauses. Then says the thing he might not have let himself say once upon a time.

“Every patient’s different. The neural pathways. The outcomes. The timelines,” he says. “There are guidelines. And then there’s human spirit. Drive. Stubbornness.

“Will I walk again? I’ll give it everything I’ve got.”

Back at Nelson’s Victory Square in his wheelchair, Chris Cairns is at first slip.

“Hit it straight, young man!” he bellows as an 8-year-old boy swings for the oaks on the boundary.

After watching kids struggle to bowl at junior cricket, he came up with an idea stolen from baseball – a spring-loaded bowling machine that guarantees a consistent, straight delivery for beginners.

He’s calling it machine ball cricket.

“They try their best to bowl, but it’s all wides and no-balls and bouncers,” he says. “This gives them a chance to enjoy the game.”

Kids aged 6 to 9 will play Machine Ball Cricket in Nelson this summer. Cairns and his former Canterbury coach, Garry MacDonald, have poured hundreds of hours into it.

“We just want the game to be enjoyed,” he says. “Better. More fun. More kids active. More parents engaged.”

He wants them to choose cricket in summer – the way he did. The way cricket chose him.

He thinks often of the greats he played with and against – players who died young: Shane Warne. Andrew Symonds. Dean Jones.

“Having been through what I’ve been through, I know how lucky I am,” he says. “Those people didn’t live the full life. I have that opportunity. So that’s up to me. And I’ll make the most of it.”

In Victory Square, the late-morning sun has burned off the dew. Kids run around him. Parents watch from the sideline. And Chris Cairns – the man who survived a ruptured aorta, a spinal stroke, bowel cancer, divorce, public scrutiny, and the collapse of his old life – rolls into the middle one more time.

Still here.

Still in the game.

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