The strangest of tactics are being employed to keep this man going, because that is what his team needs most.
Graeme Smith battled through his right tennis elbow through the IPL season for the Rajasthan Royals. It worsened during the tour to England but he continued to take great strides for the sake of his team and rightly so. Now it appears he is still battling the pain, not that it got in the way of South Africa bringing up the second highest successful fourth innings run chase in a Test match.
Most cricketers have been known to survive on cortisone injections. South Africa’s former skipper Kepler Wessels was famously known to get cortisone injected into his knees in order to keep going when his team needed him most. That tradition appears not to have changed.
But Smith is suffering the bruises and if new medical opinion is any indication, he could well have his own blood injected into the elbow. Before one assumes this as some form of witch craft or voodoo, there is apparently a solid scientific reason behind it. The procedure is meant to help the blood flow in the region and hasten the process of healing.
Smith has not ruled out surgery although he has postponed the prospect in order to make himself available for his team in this hectic schedule. He may though eventually sit out of the one day series, if the elbow so demands so that after this Test series in Australia, he is also fit for the return tour by Australia in early 2009.
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Oops...SA do it again and England are Without a Head!
