'Nothing you can do': The ballad of Chris Tremain

It's a year this week since Chris Tremain played the match that, for a good while, he came to accept was the last of his illustrious Sheffield Shield career.

All things considered, Tremain viewed it as a satisfying send-off. One he could manage to smile about as he slowly came to terms with the notion that such days had been rudely ripped away.

"I'd made peace with the fact that this was the end," Tremain tells cricket.com.au. "That last Shield game was at Allan Border Field against Queensland. I took nine wickets to scratch my way to 50 for the season, we chased down a small total and won a great game, went out and celebrated like we'd won the Shield, and had a great time with mates.

"So I just thought: Well, if that was my last Shield game, it was a hell of a way to go out."

At the same time however, there were mitigating factors that meant it wasn't the perfect exit. One was the fact that New South Wales missed the final. Also, that Tremain didn't actually know he was bidding adieu. And maybe most pointedly, he was annoyed by the way he had approached the closing stages of that match.

"They were eight down and I was stuck on 48 wickets for the season," he says. "We had 20 overs to go in the day, and it didn't look like I was going to bowl, and I started to get really anxious and grumpy. I was like, 'Come on – give me the ball, let me try and take these last two wickets so I can get 50'.

"I went to bed that night, and I was really disappointed in myself. I was like, 'You've done so much hard work this year. You've tried so hard to be the team player … and then you let yourself get so selfish about two wickets'.

"I woke up the next morning, we took the new ball and I went 'bang, bang', and took the two wickets. Guys came up and shook my hand and hugged me, and I sort of had this inner monologue going: 'Well, you got 50 wickets – are you happy now?'

"It put such a dampener on it … those last two wickets were all about me. It was everything that I hate in teammates who do that, and everything I hate in myself. It showed a character flaw that I really didn't want to admit that I had."

As it unfolded, Tremain was talked around by his pace-bowling partner Jackson Bird, who assured him he had "earned every right to really want those last two wickets". Blues skipper Moises Henriques agreed, and the matter was put to bed, even if, as he retells it now, it seems to still gnaw away at him a little.

Such forensic self-analysis has always been Tremain's way. No-one has run the magnifying glass over the successes and failures of his career more closely. And the goings on in the past six months have given this naturally introspective character cause for more introspection still. About winning and losing. About achieving and stumbling. About playing cricket, and the world beyond it.

And about how to cope with the sudden onset of a rare neurological syndrome. 

"No-one had even heard of this thing," Tremain says. "(The shoulder specialist) basically said, 'There's nothing you can do about it'.

"So that was the end of my career."

* * *

Tremain figured we had all forgotten about him. That after barnstorming his way to 50 Shield wickets last summer, he would slowly fade into obscurity, nary a word offered in tribute. The man who hails from Yeoval in Central West New South Wales, the small town that was home to a young Banjo Paterson, seemed destined to have his own bush ballad left somewhat unfinished:

Chris Tremain took countless poles, won Sheffield Shields for fun,
But when it came to Baggy Green, he never got a run

And evidently, amid an enormous home summer, Tremain's quite remarkable travails had flown under the media radar. On September 19, cricket.com.au quoted NSW coach Greg Shipperd: "Tremain has had a bit of a neck and shoulder issue that we're working on, and it could be a quick fix, too." Six days later, Cricket NSW detailed the problem as a "minor off-season niggle".

Then, for more than five months, nothing.

To be clear, the Blues weren't being evasive. At the time, their medical staff were more puzzled than alarmed. The first sign of an issue had been in preseason training, when Tremain experienced a neck spasm while performing a mid-thigh pull in the gym.

"The nerve that got damaged went down into my shoulder, and that made it a bit difficult to bowl," he explains. "We eventually got past that, but it took a long time for the nerve to settle down … then throughout probably the next month or so, it just started playing up a little bit."

With time still on his side, Tremain slowed right down in order to gradually build his loads back up, with the aim of allowing his right shoulder to recover in time for round one of the Shield. He went to his brother-in-law's wedding in San Francisco, had a bowl on a synthetic net he managed to locate over there, and felt good.

"So everything was going OK," he continues. "And then I came back to Sydney, and I tried bowling, and I had like a weird sensation the first few (bowling) sessions, where it felt like my arm was a bit of a passenger on my body. I bowled, but I didn't really know where my arm or wrist was; I couldn't feel my arm that well.

"Moises asked me one day if I was working on leg cutters because I was rolling my fingers (on the ball). I had no idea what was going on up there.

"We chalked it up to maybe the nerve being a bit inflamed. But then the next session, I tried to bowl and I felt a big clunk in there, and I got shooting pains down my arm. I tried again and it went again, so we said, 'No, that's not right'.

"(The pain) was there for a day. It was agony. And then it went away."

On August 29, Tremain visited a neurologist for a nerve conduction test. The neurologist found that one of the nerves in his arm was dead from a previous shoulder injury, which had given him reduced feeling in his forearm. The nerve impacted by his neck spasm, the neurologist said, was "groggy" but still functioning.

"So we started to try and build things back up again, doing some low-intensity stuff," he says. "And things were going OK. I got back to 75-80 per cent bowling outdoors, but then I went to bowl indoors, and in the warm-up, I felt the clunk again."

Tremain and his support staff talked out some theories. Maybe it was his shoulder subluxing, or his muscles around the nerve fatiguing. But the problem persisted beyond what they considered a reasonable timeframe.

"And that was when we started to have some pretty serious conversations about what was going on in there," he says. "And we scheduled a meeting with a surgeon."

Tremain missed the Blues round one Shield draw with South Australia, and as his teammates headed to Melbourne for a clash with his old Victoria teammates, their star paceman made his way across Sydney Harbour for a consult with a shoulder specialist. There they discussed, recounts Tremain, "the need for surgery, and if so, whether it would be reconstructed or just cleaned out".

Ultimately it was decided surgery wasn't the answer; an operation for the sake of a cleanout would come with the dual risks of losing range of motion, and infection. Major reconstructive surgery meanwhile, would mean a 12-month rehab, and wouldn't necessarily provide the fix they sought anyway.

Tremain felt "thrown for a loop" by his own body, and the lack of answers. But he kept looking for them. Seven days after his first surgical consult, and exactly two months after the nerve conduction test with the neurologist, he travelled further north, this time to the NSW Central Coast, for an appointment with another orthopaedic surgeon.

Almost immediately, Tremain was diagnosed with Parsonage-Turner Syndrome.

"It's basically a virus that … attaches itself to the nerve and shuts the nerve down," Tremain explains. "It affects one in 100,000 people, and professional sportspeople even less; I scoured the internet trying to find case studies … I found two, and they weren't overly helpful."

From the diagnosis, they were able to identify the shooting pain that had occurred (and then persisted for 24 hours) in Tremain's shoulder and arm when he was bowling in preseason as Day Zero of the virus. His symptoms clearly align with an online definition of Parsonage-Turner Syndrome from clevelandclinic.org: "a neurological condition that causes sudden and severe pain in your shoulder and upper arm. The pain can last from a few days to a few weeks. Muscle weakness in your shoulder, arm, forearm or hand then follows the pain."

The natural next question was a simple one: what do we do about it?

"Well the doctor said, 'Don't worry about it – it fixes itself'," Tremain says.

"Then he goes, 'Could take anywhere from 18 months to three years'."

* * *

Tremain has known injury setbacks and lengthy stints on the sidelines before. He is on record saying he "hated" his first 18 months back at New South Wales in 2020-21, when he wasn't selected for a single game and had to be talked out of walking away from cricket altogether. Half a dozen years earlier, he had been de-listed by the Blues, a jolt to his aspirations that armed him with a very real insight into his "cricketing mortality".

But he also knows a thing or two about resilience. He remembers arriving at Victoria training for the first time in 2014 and being cowed by his experiences playing against the likes of Matthew Wade and Cameron White.

"I was petrified of Victoria, because they were just always so abrasive, and I didn't know how I'd fit in there," he says. "But (playing with them), they weren't abrasive to the point where they broke you down – they were abrasive to the point where you had to catch up and meet their expectations and their standards.

"I'd felt unlucky to be delisted from New South Wales, but then looking back now I feel really fortunate that I got an opportunity (at Victoria) in that group of players to go and learn how to play cricket, because I had no idea how to play cricket until I was probably two or three years into my stint there."

Tremain says Wade taught him that there was "nowhere to hide", and besides, who would want to? He was handed harsh truths then held his own in an attack that included Peter Siddle, Scott Boland, James Pattinson, Jon Holland and Fawad Ahmed. Across four Shield summers in fact, including the Shield title hat-trick years (2014-17), he took more wickets than any of them.

From Victoria coach Andrew McDonald he was also dealt valuable lessons, including what he looks back on as two of the best examples of coaching he has received. The first came during a Shield game in Adelaide, in February 2017, when Tremain was returning after missing a match with a back spasm.

"I bowled in the first innings, but I sort of bowled within myself," he recalls. "'Ronnie' (McDonald) grabbed me, and he said, 'If you ever pull that shit again, you will never play for the state again'.

"He goes, 'I know you're concerned about your back. If you go 100 per cent for me and you break, I'll go onto the field and carry you off myself. But if you come into a game and 'cat it' like that again, you will not put on the cap again'."

Almost two years later at the Gabba, McDonald delivered another plainly spoken home truth when Tremain couldn't work out why his usually reliable outswinger wasn't working for him.

"I came off and told 'Ronnie', and he goes, 'Yeah, you're over-striding at the crease, your front arm's falling away, which is tilting your wrist, so everything's shaping in'," he says.

"I said, 'All right, well, how do I fix it?'

"He goes, 'You can't'.

"I said, 'I've bowled outswingers for 10 years, why can't I fix it?'

"And he goes, 'Because you're tired, mate. You've played three Shield seasons in a row, you played Aussie A in the off-season. Your legs can't hold you up at the crease."

"I said, 'All right, so what do I do?'

"He goes, 'Well, you're bowling fine. You're still taking wickets. You're just not bowling outswingers. So you're an inswing bowler today'.

"And ever since then, I've taken that approach – if it's not swinging, or this is happening, then I need to change something, or I don't. It's working out what is working, and going with that."

McDonald also instilled a belief in Tremain that he was a leader in the group by his actions, by the way he carried himself, and by his attitude. Tremain has held that close since, coming to understand that those kinds of leaders are every bit as important as the ones with the 'c' beside their name.

Through that time, he has also carried with him a basic principle (Tremain believes his craft can sometimes be made "needlessly complicated") that was articulated to him by a very young Josh Hazlewood.

"I was chatting to him one day," Tremain says, "and he said, 'I bowl a couple of inches outside off stump. If it moves away, they nick it. If it moves in, it bowls them or hits them on the pad'.

"I took that on board and went, 'All right, well, that's what I'm going to try and do'."

Tremain remembers a fast-bowling drill from his Victoria days. Targets were placed on the pitch – on a length one day, short the next, full the next – and they had to try to hit them. It was a simple exercise aimed at increasing not only accuracy, but patience and discipline. For Tremain, there was also a byproduct.

"Eventually I worked out that no matter where you go – the MCG, it's a bit flat, not bouncing much, so bring your length back and hit the top of off; WACA or Gabba, it's bouncing a little bit, pitch it up, hit the top of off," he says.

"It's exactly the same spot you're aiming for – the top of off – but it's how you get there that's the unique part. And working out how you get there is big moving forward.

"So for me, for a long time, it was 'close to the stumps, swing it away', and then I realised you could go wider on the stumps and swing it away."

Multiple 50+ wicket Sheffield Shield campaigns

Andy Bichel (Qld): 60 at 22.10 in 2004-05 | 53 at 18.66 in 1999-2000 | 50 at 26.68 in 2005-06

 

Jackson Bird (Tas): 53 at 16.00 in 2011-12 | 50 at 22.22 in 2018-19

 

Chris Tremain (Vic/NSW): 51 at 21.07 in 2017-18 | 50 at 15.90 in 2023-24

And so it went for Tremain, whose process at training as the seasons wore on remained one of trial and error. Throughout, he was building up more skills and variety together with a priceless bank of wisdom.

"They say you can't buy experience on a shelf, and you can't," he says. "Experience is just a guy that's failed so many more times than you.

"It's just thinking through a problem. Like, let's say a Cameron Bancroft, for a long time, we're like, 'All right, we want to hit you in the pad', but then you go, 'OK, let's move away from that, go a little bit wider, and try to get him to drive'.

"Not a lot changes – it's about a foot, six inches of change – but being able to do that and stay there is a matter of discipline."

Thirteen years on from his first-class debut, Tremain stands as an unheralded Shield legend: one of four to have taken 100-plus wickets for two states; one of three to have enjoyed two 50-plus wicket campaigns; and among the top 50 wicket-takers, he is alongside only Bird in averaging below 23 and striking below 50.

And here's the kicker: Tremain's 319 wickets make him the most prolific bowler in the competition's history not to have played Test cricket.

"Every time I go well, I send 'Ronnie' a text, and he's caught onto it," he smiles. "So at the end of last Shield season (after he had taken 50 wickets), I sent him another text and said, 'Mate, coming from a very strong position of power here, I just want to let you know that I'm not going to text you and let you know about it'.

"Then I took a screenshot of that and sent it to (head selector) George Bailey (laughs)."

* * *

Things changed for Tremain on December 2.

By then the "slap-in-the-face" news about Parsonage-Turner Syndrome had settled on him, and he had reached the aforementioned peace about his playing days.

But there was an avenue still to explore. Months earlier, before visiting either surgeon, he had been scheduled for an appointment with Dr Lyn Watson – a highly regarded physiotherapist who Tremain calls "the shoulder guru in Melbourne". But given the perceived likelihood of surgery, they had decided to reroute.

"I guess on a whim, I went, 'Look, if we're not operating on this, why don't we go to Lyn and see what she has to say about it clinically?'" he says.

"We flew down there and saw her, and she looked through everything, looked at my shoulder and said, 'Yeah, look, your nerve was probably no good at some point in time … but the entirety of your shoulder is in a bad way. It's 13 years of abuse'."

Evidence of that was the problem Tremain had been experiencing with the labrum at the front of his shoulder, which medical staff had been addressing with cortisone injections for the two years prior. As Watson explained, that told a tale of issues elsewhere in the shoulder.

"And she said, 'Yes, the nerve probably played a part in all this, but it's not the whole part – there's a whole lot of clinical stuff we can do to reignite what's going on in your shoulder'," he says. "So she said, 'Let's forget about what caused this, we're just going to fix it now – we're going to build it back up'.

"Then she sat me down, got really stern and said, 'Look, you're going to have to invest a lot of time and effort into this – I don't see you bowling another cricket ball for probably three or four months'. And I sort of giggled, which probably wasn't what she expected me to do, but I was like, 'The last person I saw said three years, so three months doesn't seem bad at all'.

"And that then gave me something to do, something to work towards. Now we're crawling before we walk before we run, sort of thing. Right back to really basic rehab work."

Tremain has a collection of those stretchy physio bands that he is working with for 15 minutes each day at home. That's roughly a minute for each year of fast-bowling hell he has put his right shoulder through. He doesn't know where the finish line is for his rehabilitation, and he is surprised how comfortably that sits with him.

"When we finally said, 'Right, no cricket this season', it just alleviated any pressure," he says. "We're 30 steps of the way through this thing, but we could be 30 steps of 60, or we could be 30 steps of a thousand, I don't know.

"I'm just not looking past my nose, and doing one thing at a time.

"Every two weeks we've got a video link up with Lyn to check my progression, and every time she sees me, she goes, 'Things are going really well'. So we reassess and move forward.

"And that's all we've really got to control. We've got no goals to meet, really, which I know sounds a bit directionless and pointless, but it's actually quite liberating.

"I'm still waiting for the day where I wake up and it hits me like a ton of bricks, but it hasn't. I've got a lot of really good people around me, and initially they would check in: 'How you dealing with it? How are you mentally?'

"But they've stopped asking, because I go, 'Look, I'm actually fine. I'm OK with all this'."

* * *

Tucked between its more renowned siblings, Bronte Beach and Bondi Beach, Tamarama Beach is another beautiful little pocket of golden sand along Sydney's world-famous coastline.

From his vantage point on his balcony at home, Tremain reckons he could land a cricket ball in the water. When he relocated with his family from Melbourne in 2020 – in the midst of the Covid pandemic – they moved into a split-living arrangement with his wife Shannon's parents. Just 10 minutes from the SCG and with the boys' grandparents upstairs, it has proven an ideal set-up.

In some ways, cricket has barely registered on Tremain's radar this summer, which means he has felt something of a disconnect with the Blues squad. He is currently trying to remedy that by heading into the gym more often, but it's a delicate balance; being around the group and never playing, he knows, could drive him crazy.

Some days he will take the family car, drop his boys at school, and head in for his brief workout, primarily to catch up with his teammates. Others, he will take the 'golf' car (where his clubs permanently reside) and head for a round with whoever is available. Tremain plays off a handicap of three, and happily, his injury does not impair his golf swing.

He is also running up to five times a week to stay fit and keep the kilometres in his legs. Just a couple of weeks ago he ran a half-marathon around the eastern suburbs at 4:52min/km pace, while he is also tracking his distance covered on both the golf course and running via an app on his watch.

When he first started playing golf a decade ago, he would hit 1,000 balls between lessons to ensure he had taken the pointers on board. In the same vein, he had set his sights on walking/running 1,000km between golf courses and the streets of Tamarama and beyond through this current layoff. That goal recently accomplished, he has just upped his target to 1,000 miles (1,600km).

Most of all though, Tremain has relished simply being part of the furniture at home. After years of wrestling with the emotional toll of missing birthdays, funerals, first days at school and other significant life events, it feels like a luxury to just be around, helping out with quotidian tasks and spending time with Shannon and the kids.

"On the weekends, although it's carnage – the boys are wild – you get to do so much stuff with them," he says. "I'm not missing anything.

"Even just doing the washing, cleaning, keeping the house in order – all those little things, it just has this flow-on effect around the house. There's still home stresses, but they're definitely alleviated and everyone's a lot happier because I can pick up a lot of the slack that I never would have been able to if I was on tour."

And while a window into homelife is one thing, Tremain has enough perspective to know this temporary state does not paint a realistic picture of life after cricket.

"At the moment, I'm still getting paid like a cricketer, and all I'm doing is running, gym, rehab and golf," he smiles. "Never in my life again will this happen."

Tremain has sketched out his working days beyond cricket but is reluctant to voice them until he is on that path. This game is all he has known since he moved down to Sydney as an 18-year-old and quickly became entrenched in the professional system. But he knows there is more out there for him.

"I worked out very early that if I play cricket until I'm 35, and I'm not going to retire until I'm 65, well the next job I do for 30 years, when I finish that, I hope that's what people will remember me for," he says.

"I won't get to 45-50 and be that guy who played a bit of Shield cricket and is holding on for dear life. I'd like to be able to go out and do something else, because it's a big, wide world out there."

First though, there is unfinished business. Tremain badly wanted a Baggy Green in his mid-late 20s but insists, with the 'Big Three' virtually ever-present in the Test XI, he always understood why it wasn't happening. Now and then he would feel himself getting hot under the collar about another paceman receiving an opportunity ahead of him, but those days are long behind him.

"You can get bitter and grumpy about it as you get older," he says, "but I think I've gone the other way, and mellowed out."

Last summer he got a kick out of watching Xavier Bartlett receive an ODI cap, just as Tremain had seven-and-a-half years earlier.

"For him to get that opportunity, it's exciting," he says. "What kind of arsehole would I be sitting at home just thinking about myself, going, 'that should have been me'?"

And in what currently remains his final Shield match, Tremain was quick to seek out Queensland's young debutant paceman, Callum Vidler, and hand him a souvenir stump. Experience, and wisdom, reveals itself in different ways.

None of which means he has lost his competitive instincts. Baggy Green aside, the item missing from his collection is a Shield title with his native state. It is out there on the horizon for him now, a carrot dangling beyond a possible 2025-26 return.

When the Blues went on their record 16-match winless run between February 2022 and November 2023, Tremain took it personally, and it hurt him more than most would have realised. It also challenged his usually unshakeable confidence.

"There was a game against WA," he recalls. "They were 30 runs behind us (at stumps on day two), with three wickets in hand (in their second innings).

"And I was so anxious, and nervous, that I sat out the front of the SCG for half an hour (the next morning) because I was so petrified of going in because of what might have happened. Like: What happens if the last three wickets scrape together 150, and then we capitulate, and we lose this game as well? Which one of my mates is getting dropped?

"There was vitriol from every avenue that you could imagine getting placed on the team, and I just wanted that to go away.

"We ended up bowling them out and chasing four runs or something, and we won our first game in forever. And then we rolled on with it.

"Then last year we went from last to third, so we were progressing, but I was always really stressed around us not performing to the level that I know we can.

"I just really want New South Wales Cricket to be the powerhouse that it was, and it does feel like we're getting back to a point where we're getting really good."

As he rides his team's fortunes with white knuckles, Tremain is more patiently plotting his own return, whenever it may be, to ensure his bush ballad isn't left unfinished.

Sheffield Shield standings 2024-25

Team	Matches played M	Wins W	Losses L	Drawn D	No results N/R	Deductions Ded.	Batting Bonus Bat	Bowling Bonus Bowl	Total points PTS
1 South Australia Men SA	10	6	1	3	0	0	7.61	9	55.61
2 Queensland Bulls QLD	10	3	3	4	0	0	9.06	8.7	39.76
3 Victoria Men VIC	10	4	5	1	0	0	5.19	9.3	39.49
4 NSW Men NSW	10	3	4	3	0	0	6.99	8.4	36.39
5 Tasmanian Tigers Men TAS	10	3	5	2	0	0	7.72	8.2	35.92
6 Western Australia Men WA	10	3	4	3	0	0	5.83	8.6	35.43

Legend

M: Matches played

W: Wins

L: Losses

D: Drawn

N/R: No results

Ded.: Deductions

Bat: Batting Bonus

Bowl: Bowling Bonus

PTS: Total points