Udal on Parkinson's Disease - 'When you play cricket, you learn to fight'
Shaun Udal celebrates dismissing Sachin Tendulkar
September 20, The Cricket Paper
Last Tuesday night, Shaun Udal popped out for an after-work pint with Hampshire chairman Rod Bransgrove. The following day he would endure a “horrible hour-and-a-quarter” of muscle reactivation therapy with an otherwise delightful physio called Sue Mills.
One was pure pleasure, one pure pain but bitter experience has taught the former Hampshire spinner that both are pivotal parts of his therapeutic routine after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in March last year.
The announcement drew shock and sympathy from all quarters of the county game. Udal had been a stalwart on the south coast between 1989 and 2007, becoming the first player born in the county to captain Hampshire to success in a Lord’s final. Then, after a short-lived retirement, he took his nagging off-spin and hard-hitting lower-order batting to Middlesex for three more seasons, helping them to lift the T20 cup in 2008.
Udal’s England career was something of a Curate’s egg. He won the first of 11 ODI caps in 1994 but, despite being named in Test squads at the same time, had to wait until 2005 for his red-ball debut on a tour of the Indian sub-continent. The highlight was a haul of 4-14 on the final day at Mumbai, including the wicket of Sachin Tendulkar, to help square a memorable series. He left the pro game in 2010 with 1,300 wickets, 11,000 runs, a suite named after him at the Ageas Bowl and a precious matchball signed by the Little Master. Udal is rightly proud of his four Test caps but feels his all-round game was worthy of more ODIs appearances. One suspects his white-ball economy rate and handy batting would have found a perfect home in the T20 format, given the pivotal role that spinners started to play as the shortest form of the game began to evolve. Still, he retired largely satisfied with what he achieved and continued to play the game at lower levels. It was there that the first signs of his condition were revealed.
“Around 2013, I started getting tremors down my arm when I was playing for Berkshire and Camberley. I was bowling big full tosses and long hops so I was being smacked around by club cricketers. I wasn’t too happy about that. I kept having tests and being wired up to machines but they could not find anything wrong. Previously, I’d had surgery on my neck so, at first, I thought it might be related to that.
“Then, in January 2019, I blacked out and fell down the stairs at work. I woke up in an ambulance with my neck in a brace and I was blue-lighted to Southampton General. I had three days of tests. Eventually, not long before my 50th birthday, the results came back as Parkinson’s. They did not even ring me, I found out via a letter. But they reckon I might have had it for two or three years beforehand.”
Since then, Udal has been working hard just to retain the normality of his life. He walks to work in Basingstoke as the Managing Director of Cotton Graphics, suppliers of workwear, still drives as long he updates the authorities on his condition and has been playing on Saturdays for Old Basing. He bats, fields at slip but, sadly, cannot bowl anymore. “My arm shakes too much so I can’t grip the ball properly.”
Quite understandably, Udal admits to periods of introspection and troublesome thoughts when he is on his own after work, hence those therapeutic beers with Bransgrove. The honesty of some of his tweets at @ShaggyUdal have drawn concern. But, as he points out, he is very happy to engage with fans and friends from his former career. It is testament to Udal, as both a cricketer and a person, that so many team-mates, opponents and commentators are constantly enquiring about his welfare.
It is particularly cruel that Udal as been struck by such brutal malady around his personal half-century. Statistics suggest that this period of life is often our most miserable due to the convergence of work stress, aging parents and the demands of raising children. Even without Parkinson’s, unfortunately Udal over-indexes in this regard. His father, a widely-respected figure in local cricket, passed in 2013, his mother had to go into a home shortly afterwards due to dementia and his son is on the autistic spectrum. Even his wife is nursing a broken arm after being knocked off her bike recently. Fortunately, that will heel.
Like every business owner, the pandemic has been an unforeseen and unprecedented problem. It has been a stressful period for anyone who has responsibility for their own livelihood, that of a workforce or ‘merely’ a family. Udal has borne all this with the added burden of going 14 weeks without the medication and treatment that allows him to function properly.
He still visits the Ageas Bowl when work allows and was the perfect choice to talk to the current Hampshire playing squad earlier this year about building friendships in the game and appreciating the life they possess.
“It is a day-to-day battle and there are lonely times,” he admitted. “But I have had a lot of help from people at Hampshire, Middlesex, the ECB and PCA.
“I look back with a lot of pride on my career. I played with some of the greats – Shane Warne, David Gower, Robin Smith, Freddie Flintoff, Wasim Akram. That was more than I ever dreamed of. But you don’t think ‘I better make the most of this as I am going to get Parkinson’s in 20 year’s time’.
“I have to be realistic. I am going to deteriorate at some stage but I have to make sure that is 10 or 15 years away, not around the corner
“I wear my heart on my sleeve sometimes but I am still here. My legs still work, I have a job, a family, I go home to the same house every night and I have a bit of money in my back pocket for a beer. Life isn’t too bad but it could be better. Still, as we all know, when you play cricket, you learn to fight.”
Keep fighting Shaggy.
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