Credit: X
Former South Africa batter AB de Villiers revealed that he played with a detached retina for almost two years. De Villiers announced his retirement from international cricket in 2018 and brought down the curtains on his illustrious career. However, the batter continued to play for his IPL franchise Royal Challengers Bangalore. In 2021, the former Proteas cricketer played his last professional match during the Indian Premier League.
Two years after his last game, De Villiers revealed that he played with a bad retina for almost two years in his career. The former cricketer was in a conversation with Wisden where he revealed the incident when he suffered an eye injury not too before his retirement. The 39-year-old said, “My youngster accidentally kicked me on my eye with his heel. I started really losing vision in the right eye.”
He added, “When I got the surgery done the doctor actually asked me, ‘How in the world did you play cricket like this?’. Luckily my left eye did a decent job for the last two years of my career.” Not only this but Mr. 360 also opened up about his decision to not reverse his retirement. He said, “Covid certainly played a role, there’s no doubt about it. From an international perspective, that 2015 World Cup hurt big time.”
De Villiers went on to say, “I often found myself thinking, I don’t know, eh? Could this be the end of my career? I didn’t even really want to play IPL or anything else. I got away from everything in 2018 and then decided to push one more time with a bit of Test cricket, to try and beat India and Australia over here, and then I’ll call it. I didn’t want any spotlight on me. I just wanted to say, ‘I had a great time, thank you very much’.”
