May 2016. Ben Cutting knew something was wrong when he couldn’t even climb out of bed during a golf trip with his teammates.
A few days earlier, after five long seasons riding the pine, Cutting had enjoyed just his second IPL outing, hitting a pair of maximums and teaming up with India’s Yuvraj Singh to help Sunrisers Hyderabad home against Kings XI Punjab.
“Yuvi was hitting sixes from one end, and I was hitting sixes from the other,” he tells cricket.com.au. “It was a pretty good way to get into things, playing for a new team.
“But I was teetering after the game, starting to feel a bit unwell.”
The Sunrisers had four days off before their next match, in Delhi. Cutting took an early flight with the rest of the squad’s overseas contingent; they had booked in several rounds at one of the city’s world-renowned golf courses.
Then the flu-like symptoms hit him harder than he’d hit those sixes.
“The worst fatigue imaginable,” he says. “I did not leave my bed for the week.”
The finals were imminent. Cutting had at last been picked in an IPL first XI. He was desperate not to let a bout of the flu prevent him from seizing the opportunity, but he was in a bad way.
He missed the match in Delhi, and another two days later in Kolkata. He woke up on May 23, two days out from the finals, and dragged himself to training. He bowled six balls and had to lie down. He covered himself in icepacks.
Twenty-four hours later, he went again, and felt marginally better.
“Still absolutely cooked,” he says. “But good enough.”
Cutting kept his head down and hoped he had done enough to be selected. The Australian brains trust of head coach Tom Moody, assistant coach Simon Helmot and captain David Warner decided he had. He was in.
Across the next five days, bowling as fast – perhaps faster – than ever, he helped Sunrisers through three finals, all the way to IPL glory.
The decider against Royal Challengers Bengaluru was the apex of his career. With 39no from 15 balls and the prize wicket of Chris Gayle among figures of 2-35, he was player of the match.
Yet that month also marked the beginning of Cutting’s gradual descent.
The sickness he picked up wasn’t the flu.
And it wouldn’t leave him for years.
* * *
In the frantic world of football social media, there’s an oft-used line.
The streets won’t forget.
It’s used to reference a former player that only the diehards still celebrate: one who was maybe a cult hero; who dazzled fans with his or her skills and swagger; or someone whose peak was fleeting, yet sky high.
In the streets of Hyderabad, a heaving city of more than 11 million people in south central India, they don’t forget Ben Cutting.
“I wasn’t really expecting to get picked up in the (2016) IPL auction, but I was lucky enough to end up at Sunrisers, with a lot of Aussies there,” he says.
“Tom Moody, to his credit, sat me down as soon as I got there and said, ‘Look, you’re not going to start. You’re basically here as a backup allrounder’.”
Cutting knew how it worked. He had played one match in four IPL seasons. Through those years he had learned how valuable that downtime was, if he was willing to put in the work.
“Spending two or three months there at a time, with the calibre of players that were around, was the perfect opportunity for me to get workloads into my body,” he says. “So I’d train really hard, and come home with some new skills every year.”
In 2016, Cutting focused on getting bigger and stronger, with an eye to bowling faster. In what might have felt like another lifetime, he had burst onto the scene as a tearaway in the 2009-10 Sheffield Shield, capturing 46 wickets. But in the intervening period, a catalogue of injuries kept costing him velocity.
When he fell ill at the back-end of the 2016 IPL, the strength training he had been doing aided Cutting in a way he hadn’t anticipated. With his body struggling to get through a practice session, he experimented.
“I knew I had to conserve my energy,” he says. “So I slowed down my run-up, and just tried to unload at the crease – heavier and harder.
“My bowling speeds lifted from around mid-130s to mid-140s, and I ended up bowling quite a heavy ball for the remainder of the IPL.
“It really just came from self-preservation. It was: What can I do to get through, do the best job I can for the team, and not be absolutely cooked again, like I was after that training session?”
Cutting nabbed the fourth overseas spot in the Sunrisers XI for the second preliminary final ahead of much more seasoned internationals Eoin Morgan and Kane Williamson. The pair had struggled for form throughout the tournament and Cutting presented a different kind of option: late hitting power plus good pace and clever variations.
After taking 1-14 from three overs, he kept his place two days later for the third preliminary final against Gujarat Lions. Again he made an important contribution with the ball, dismissing Aaron Finch and Dwayne Smith in taking 2-20 from three overs. His extra pace seemed to be surprising batters, and it meant the change-down for his off-cutter slower ball was more pronounced, which was making it more effective.
Cutting was also a key cog in the field, patrolling a boundary throughout the innings and saving runs aplenty with his athleticism and rocket arm. One effort following a Finch pull shot involved an acrobatic leap well beyond the rope, and a mid-air throw back into the field of play. In close-fought finals, saves like those could be decisive.
Yet in the state he was in, three overs and 90 high-energy minutes in the field was proving to be a gruelling workload.
“It was still lingering,” he says of the illness. “I just thought I was coming off the back of the flu, and the fatigue would pass. But I was barely scraping through, and I don’t think anyone realised just how much I was struggling.”
* * *
Cutting took his player-of-the-match trophy home to Brisbane, his legend in Hyderabad forever assured. The fanfare didn’t extend to Queensland, where eyes were instead fixed on a Maroons side that had just enjoyed a narrow win in the State of Origin opener.
In the IPL final, Cutting had bowled faster than he had in years. The extra pace again aided his slower-ball variations, which accounted for the wicket of not only Gayle but KL Rahul as well. Allied to that was his devastating 15-ball 39 – including four sixes – which ultimately put the game just beyond the reach of RCB, who fell nine runs short of the 209 they needed to end a title drought that would extend another eight years.
The timing was good for him to recover at home. Across the first month of winter, he began to feel more like himself. Yet there remained a quiet concern something still wasn’t quite right.
“I was never anywhere near what I was (typically) with my energy levels,” he says. “(The feeling) was very much fatigue-based, and that then affected my training in pre-season, and everything that followed.”
In the white-ball competitions of 2016-17, Cutting’s form fluctuated as the fatigue took hold. By the close of December, he had pushed his body through 10 white-ball games and two of Queensland’s five Shield matches (he was omitted from the last of those – a trip to Perth – for what was cited at the time as “additional recovery time”).
Seven months on from the IPL, he was still flagging. Through those early Shield rounds, he had struggled to back up effectively on consecutive days. Then in a one-day game for Souths in Brisbane Premier Cricket, the symptoms worsened: despite bowling just four overs, he experienced blurred vision and numbness through his left arm. Feeling as though he was overheating, Cutting took himself off the field and sat in the clubhouse freezer.
His concerns grew. After some initial testing, he was referred to an infectious diseases physician.
“I was pushing my body so hard, but by then I was worried something was going on with my ticker,” he says. “We did heart tests, but nothing flagged up. So we did a deep dive with the (infectious diseases) specialist, and that was where it was diagnosed as a mosquito-borne virus – (either) Ross River fever or dengue fever.”
Cutting turned 30 in January. In what should have been the prime of his career, he found himself fighting post-viral fatigue syndrome, which would in time morph into chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS).
The first career domino to fall was first-class cricket. That March, in his last-ever Shield match, he bowled just 11 of Queensland’s 96 overs during an innings win in Hobart. In a clear sign of the direction his career was already heading in, he also crashed four sixes in making 68 from 50 balls.
Cutting had been desperate to capitalise on his increased pace. As a consequence, he was striving to near breaking point. It was a blinkered determination borne of a chaotic career. In December 2011, he was 12th man in a Test match. Across the next three years, he played eight white-ball internationals. Yet never did truly make his mark for Australia. He felt injuries had robbed him of reaching his potential, and with that, he still felt a strong sense of unfinished business.
And so he resolved to not let any more opportunities pass him by.
“When you’re up and flying, and playing really well, you want to make the most of that,” he says. “But that was probably to my detriment in the end … my Shield performances dropped off, I couldn’t maintain the overs in my legs to service my team, or bowl well enough to even stay in the team.
“I think ‘QC’ (Queensland Cricket) probably thought I was just being lazy, which was certainly not the case. It just spiralled so far. I should’ve taken a break when I needed to.”
* * *
With his stocks at an all-time high after his feats in the 2016 IPL final, Cutting headed back to the Sunrisers the following year. Yet there was no glorious return. In four matches, he didn’t pass 20. He took just one wicket.
With his immune system still worryingly low, he was prone to sickness.
“The chronic fatigue just continued to stuff me up,” he says. “Every time I went too hard, it just blew me out of the water; I didn’t have enough in the tank to even hold a conversation.”
He returned home sick and deflated, his career at a crossroads. The contrast from 12 months earlier was stark (the Maroons even lost that year’s Origin opener). And after finishing fifth in the Shield, Queensland was under new management, with Wade Seccombe taking the reins. In June, the Bulls went to Moreton Island for a squad bonding session.
“At that point I was sleeping 19 hours a day,” he says. “My wife was really concerned about how I was. Then I went to Moreton Island, we did this huge hike, and I was nowhere. I blew out a hernia, and was completely f—ed.”
Cutting underwent surgery, laid low for a couple of months, then launched into pre-season training. It was becoming the new pattern of a career that was quite suddenly being played out within the narrow parameters of CFS and white-ball cricket. When he returned to the Queensland set-up, he was intent on not being viewed as the man stricken by an invisible ailment.
“We’d have a Bulls (training) session, do gym and cardio in the mornings, finish at 10am, and I’d go home and sleep for four hours,” he says. “Then I’d go back for a net session in the afternoon, come home and sleep all night.
“That was how I had to structure my week. I was trying to keep everyone none the wiser; I didn’t want to flag any issues that meant I wouldn’t be able to play.
“In a male sporting environment, you don’t want to be seen to be slacking; you want to be seen to be putting in for your mates. But I was never cutting corners – I was just stuffed.”
Cutting’s one-day career gently petered out across the next two years, as his health combined with market forces to usher him naturally enough in the direction of Twenty20. At 31, and with his CFS safely under wraps, he still presented as an attractive package.
“I’d still been trying to play first-class cricket, while still wrestling with the fatigue,” he says. “But I had people in my ear at the time saying, ‘T20 is your game – that’s how you are set up to play now, you should pursue that more’. So that’s when I turned to that freelance model.”
In the 2018 IPL auction, Cutting was the subject of a bidding war that went the way of Mumbai Indians, who won his services for A$426,000. He played nine matches through that campaign – doubling his IPL career tally – but took just two wickets and scored only 96 runs, with a high score of 37.
By then he had significantly altered his diet, cutting out all refined sugars and alcohol in a bid to both overcome CFS and extract as much as he could from a body that continued to let him down.
“It was all or nothing,” he says. “I was all in, or I wasn’t interested.”
**
Ironically, it was during the COVID-19 period of 2020-21 that his energy levels began to gradually rise. For half a decade he had often managed to play through the fog of CFS, remaining a regular fixture in the BBL with Brisbane Heat and Sydney Thunder, and frequenting a number of short-format domestic competitions across the globe.
Ultimately though, his all-or-nothing approach returned to haunt him.
“I don’t know if I’d change anything with how hard I went – I think that’s just ingrained in me,” he says. “But that same drive to work hard and push your body to the limits is probably why I then stuffed my back up so badly.”
As his career wound down, Cutting suffered a serious back injury, while he also dealt with nerve issues, drop foot, and a ruptured plantar fascia. Subsequent spinal surgery was successful, and so too has his transition into the world of real estate across the past 12 months.
He ranks the 2016 IPL triumph with Sunrisers as highly as playing for Australia in terms of career achievements. The price be damned.
“Yes, it did come at a cost, but that’s the sacrifice you make in trying to reach your goals,” he says. “You’re not always going to reach them, but as long as you know that you’ve done everything you can…”
