Cricket: Bond now faces up to the knife

By RICHARD BOOCK

Shane Bond's battle with his most persistent and feared adversary is set to be won or lost under a surgeon's knife.

Widely regarded as one of the world's fastest bowlers at his peak, the 29-year-old has been beset by back injury throughout his career, and was forced out of New Zealand's recent tour of England under another stress-fracture cloud.

By his own calculations it was the seventh stress-fracture setback of his career, and forced him to face the fact that surgery on his troublesome vertebrae was probably the best of a fairly poor range of options.

Bond, who will have surgery in Christchurch on August 19, could be forgiven for thinking the medical staff were playing a joke on him when they took him through his choices. One option, they explained, was to quit the game. Another was to keep playing in the hope that the damaged vertebrae would break completely and subsequently render him free of pain.

A third option was rest, something he had already tried without much success, and then there was the surgery - involving a graft from his hip being fused to his vertebrae with bolts and titanium wire.

The operation will mean Bond, who last played a full international on last year's tour of Sri Lanka, will not bowl again for three months, and will almost certainly be out of the competitive arena until at least January.

If his back was to receive another setback at that stage, he accepts that his career would probably be at an end.

"I know that if it doesn't work, that's probably it," he said yesterday. "And I think I could live with that, knowing that I'd tried everything within my power.

"I've tried rest and I've changed my action, but my structure just doesn't seem strong enough to deal with the strain. This seems the most logical next step."

An eternal optimist, Bond told the Weekend Herald that there was at least some good news to come out of the latest examination, in that the rest of his spine (apart from the mangled bit) was apparently in pristine condition.

For all that, the concern for cricket supporters is that Bond is poised to go the same way as Geoff Allott and Dion Nash - the NZ pacemen whose international careers were derailed by similar back injuries.

Bond's initial foray into representative cricket was hampered by three stress fracture injuries before he was 21, and only gained any genuine traction after he had taken a year off to attend the police training academy.

He burst back on to the scene in the summer of 2001-02, impressing the Australians with his pace and swing in the tests and helping to oust them from their own VB Series.

He then crushed the million-dollar Indian batting line-up at home the following summer, and took six wickets in an ultimately unsuccessful World Cup showdown against Australia.

By the time his back failed him in Sri Lanka last year, he had taken 43 wickets in just 10 tests at an average of 24.30, and 52 ODI wickets in 31 outings.

With him on board, New Zealand's bowling attack had a rare, extra dimension.

Skipper Stephen Fleming said yesterday that Bond's presence gave the team a point of difference over their rivals and it would be a "massive" boost if he was able to recover from the operation and make a full return.

"Shane showed us just how valuable a genuine spearhead could be," Fleming said. "He did for us what Steve Harmison has done for England and what Glen McGrath and Brett Lee have done for Australia."

Fleming said his favourite Bond memory was last year's World Cup match against Australia at Port Elizabeth, where the speedster's six for 23 were not only the best figures in New Zealand ODI history, but also the second best recorded against Australia. They were also the second best for any bowler in a losing side.