Indian cricket star Rishabh Pant and the surgeon who saved his career.Credit: Photos: Supplied; Artwork: Monique Westermann
“I need to get out, I need to get out.” Rishabh Pant cried out from under his overturned car on the highway near the northern Indian city of Dehradun on December 30, 2022.
Conscious after a high-speed crash and trapped in the passenger cabin, he could feel and see his knee bent at a sickening 90-degree angle.
But Rishabh could also smell the unmistakable whiff of petrol from the smoking hulk of the vehicle. As so many Bollywood films had shown him, a car in this position had every chance of blowing up.
Rishabh Pant’s car blew up about two minutes after he was dragged out of the wreckage.
As he later related to doctor Dinshaw Pardiwala, the expert surgeon who would repair his shattered knee, Rishabh called over a couple of bystanders and pleaded for them to drag him out of the car. It was an excruciating escape that peeled clumps of skin from his back, buttocks and legs, through the shattered glass of the car window.
“There was a lot of the smell of petrol around, so he had this real fear, like you see in Bollywood movies where the car blows up very soon,” Dinshaw tells this masthead. “He was saying ‘I need to get out, I need to get out’. So the guys held his hand. Rishabh is quite a heavy boy, so taking him out was not that easy.
“They had to drag him out, and in the process of dragging him out with all that glass there he lost all of his skin, right from the nape of his neck down to his toes. All of that skin got peeled and abraded off while they did that. But they managed to get him out.
“That was a good decision, because within about two minutes of that, the car did blow up, and that basically saved his life. It was absolutely extraordinary.”
‘His knee was in a terrible state’
That night, Dinshaw took a call from Nitin Patel, the head of sports science and medicine at India’s National Cricket Academy. He was told that Rishabh, India’s brightest young cricket star, had been involved in a serious accident and was being taken by ambulance to the nearest hospital.
Once there, it became clear that while his condition was stable with no serious head or internal injuries, Rishabh was still in bad shape. After four days in Dehradun, he was airlifted to Mumbai, and the hospital where Dinshaw has overseen surgical remedies for BCCI and IPL cricketers since 2005.
What he saw when he first took a look at Rishabh was something well outside the regular experience of a network of surgeons that also includes numerous knee and shoulder experts in Australia.
“As soon as we examined that knee it was apparent his knee was in a terrible state – extremely unstable in all directions,” Dinshaw says. “Unfortunately India seems to be one of the capitals of the world for knee dislocations. We get a lot of these injuries, people falling off bikes or trains. So we deal with a lot of them.
Dr Dinshaw Pardiwala with Rishabh Pant in April 2023, three months after surgery.
“But there are two types. You get the sports dislocation, something you’d see in rugby, football or Australian rules or kabaddi in India. Sometimes we see it in motor sports, but usually these are low-velocity dislocations, where multiple ligaments tear but they are relatively predictable. You take care of those ligaments, and you know there is a high possibility that the athlete is going to get back to sports in time.
“But Rishabh’s case was unusual in that this was a high-velocity knee dislocation, like in train accidents, motorcycle accidents, car accidents. They’re a different beast altogether, because of the velocity, you’ve shattered everything. It’s in such a bad state that to reconstruct and repair that is not easy.”
During Dinshaw’s first examination, Rishabh’s mother Saroj was close by. She could tell from the surgeon’s body language that this was going to be a long road back to cricket – if indeed there was to be one at all.
“She read my face really well, and she suspected something was not looking good,” Dinshaw says. “We sent him off for tests and MRIs to be sure of what we were dealing with, and she took me to one side and said ‘Look, I know what the situation is, and I hope he is going to be able to walk again, because right now it looks terrible’.
“Of course you don’t want to promise anyone the moon, but I said ‘Look, we’ve dealt with these injuries before, and I’m sure we can get him to walk again and maybe exercise again. I really don’t know whether we’ll be able to get him to play cricket again’. She accepted that it is good news he’s alive, good news he will be able to walk again, and then we’ll just wait and watch.”
‘Quite a daunting surgery’
Surgery took place on January 6, a long operation in which Rishabh’s knee tendons, ligaments, shock absorbers and muscles were all repaired. During the operation, Dinshaw was aware that he was not just working on the knee of someone who needed to walk again, but of a dynamic wicketkeeper-batter who needed to be able to throw himself around without a second thought.
“Once we got the MRI done, the first question Rishabh asked was not ‘Can I play?’, but ‘When am I going to play again? I know I have this bad injury, but when can I play again?’,” Dinshaw says.
“The first question from the BCCI and the NCA was ‘Is he going to play again, and how is it going to be?’
“We really don’t have much precedent for high-velocity knee dislocations among athletes. So we said ‘We’re going to do our best’. As a wicketkeeper he has to get back his flexibility, flexible enough but also stable and strong enough, so managing all components. There’s so many different variables involved, and that would be the challenge. Fortunately, everything just fell into place.”
What gave Rishabh a chance of a full comeback, more than anything else, was the providential absence of any extensive blood vessel or nerve damage in the knee. That meant Dinshaw and the rest of his medical team were able to concentrate on fixing the mechanics of the knee in the knowledge that the blood flow and feeling would right themselves.
“This was a particularly bad one, no doubt, but fortunately his blood vessels were intact and his nerves were intact. So that always makes it easier for us. We know the limb will survive for sure, we know he’s not going to lose sensation for sure, so everything that’s there is something we can fix.
Rishabh Pant after his accident.
“If that’s there, then as surgeons we are happy and confident. The stuff we get anxious about is what’s not within our control, where we have to wait for nature to take its course, and that becomes so unpredictable. Fortunately for us, everything he had broken, snapped and torn or in a bad state, was repairable.
“It was quite a daunting surgery, but because we’d done quite a few of these, we were confident he was going to be able to walk and run. As soon as that surgery was over, my first views were that yes we can get him to sports, but I don’t know whether we can get him to elite sports again, because that requires so much more.”
There was, of course, a dual mental challenge. Not only that of reliving the accident, but coping with the loss of control created by its injuries.
“You go from one day being a superstar who can do anything on the field, and the next day you’re in bed, you can’t get out, you can’t do the basic functions like going to the washroom or brushing your teeth on your own,” Dinshaw says. “That whole shock of going from superhuman to almost subhuman. The fact you need someone’s help to go to the toilet, all of that was traumatic for him.
“The timeline we set out was about 18 months. I told him ‘If everything goes well and we take the 10 steps for that, then we are looking at about 18 months when you’re back to playing’. Rishabh is an optimistic guy, so he said ‘18 months is too long, I’m going to show I can do this in 12 months’. Motivating him, and him motivating himself, helped tremendously in really pushing it and getting him back faster.”
‘Being there for the Australian series was paramount’
About six months into rehab, Dinshaw became wholly convinced that Rishabh would make a full recovery to return to the batting crease and keeping gloves. He played an exhibition match in January 2024, about 12 months after the surgery, and then suited up for Delhi in the Indian Premier League in March. His coach, Ricky Ponting, was one of many awed observers.
“Even just thinking about the mental side of coming back [is hard], but the physical side of it, the rehab he went through,” Ponting has said. “Right from 12 months before that, he said ‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll guarantee you I’ll be right for the IPL’ and we thought OK, he’ll be able to bat, we might have to manage him, use him as a sub player [shakes head].
“[He] kept every game, [was] one of our leading run-scorers, batted No.3 in the World Cup, [and was] part of the World Cup-winning team. It’s a remarkable comeback.”
Nevertheless, there was one goal motivating Rishabh more than any other: To return to Test cricket in Australia, where he had made such an unforgettable impact on the 2020-21 series won by India. Asked about the prospect of Rishabh playing against Australia again, Dinshaw is very clear on its importance to his recovery.
“Australia was his major focus,” he says. “Australia is where things started, and Australia is where I just have to go. So at every point, Australia and the series in Australia, and he loves the longer format – India versus Australia was right up there. For him, being in the team for the Australian series was paramount. He knew that all the time, everyone else around him knew that was what we really needed to target.
“I’ve met him on multiple occasions thereafter, and what I’ve noticed is that this experience has changed him as a human being too. You’ll experience that when he’s in Australia. He’s grown and matured as a human being. So, yes, there’s going to be some banter, and, yes, he’s going to be very effective on the field, but when you talk to him, you’ll see he’s a different Rishabh altogether.
“He’s become quite a philosopher. He’s gone through something that most of us hopefully never have to go through, and you do get some insight into life and priorities and other aspects. He never had an opportunity to think of those aspects of life before, and over the year of his treatment and rehab he had a lot of thinking to do, and that has changed him as a human being.”
While the world rejoiced at Rishabh’s return, the Australian side will be wary as well as welcoming once the Perth Test starts this week. Captain Pat Cummins can recall getting swatted around the Gabba in 2021, and knows Rishabh was a huge absentee from the World Test Championship final at the Oval in 2023.
Rishabh Pant after hitting the winning runs at the Gabba in January 2021.Credit: AP
“[It’s] great to see him back – but ask me again at the end of the summer and I might have a different view,” he says. “It looked like a pretty horrific injury. He’s always pretty exciting to watch. I wouldn’t be surprised if he gives us the odd headache throughout the summer.”
The walls of Dinshaw’s office are adorned with pictures, playing shirts and other items marking the successful returns of cricketers and many other athletes from injury. Given the extraordinary comeback of Rishabh, from an accident that so nearly cost him his life, there may soon be a memento from this Australian tour.
“I’ve learned a lot from a lot of the Australian surgeons who I’ve interacted with,” Dinshaw says with a smile. “I suspect that some of that information and knowledge has then been used to treat Rishabh, who is going to come over there and, I’m sure, wallop the ball around.
“Rishabh was keen that something of his gets on that wall, and I said you need to wait until you get to that performance level, and that’s really precious for us and inspiring for so many other athletes.”
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