New South Wales paceman Chris Tremain is pulling up stumps on a wonderful 12-year playing career after being unable to plot a comeback path from a rare neurological condition.
Tremain, 34, played four ODIs in 2016, won four Sheffield Shield titles during his six-season stint with Victoria, and sits 17th on the all-time wicket-takers list in that competition. He will officially finish with NSW at season’s end, once his current contract expires.
Chris Tremain | By the numbers
Australia: Four ODIS (Oct 2016), seven wickets at 36.42. Econ 6.37, SR 34.2, BB: 3-64
Victoria: 54 Shield matches, 209 wickets at 23.81. SR 47.86. BBI: 7-82. BBM: 10-143
NSW: 29 Shield matches, 110 wickets at 19.98. SR 46.86. BBI: 6-20. BBM: 9-63
Sheffield Shield overall: 83 matches, 319 wickets at 22.47. SR: 47.52. 5WI: 11. 10WM: 1
Tremain won four Shield titles and a one-day title with Victoria, as well as a BBL title with Melbourne Renegades
In late October 2024, after experiencing an unusual feeling in his right shoulder that at times extended to shooting pain down the forearm, the right-arm quick was diagnosed with Parsonage-Turner Syndrome.
“It’s basically a virus that … attaches itself to the nerve and shuts the nerve down,” he told cricket.com.au last year. “It affects one in 100,000 people, and professional sportspeople even less.”
Though given only a vague timeline as to his potential recovery, Tremain remained hopeful of a comeback; he was only 33 at the time.
“We had a return-to-play plan in place,” he tells cricket.com.au. “We followed that pretty rigorously, and we got back to bowling and getting ready to go.
“We were slowly moving in the right direction, hitting targets in ball speed and then loads, effort, intensity, all that sort of stuff. I finally got back to a place where I could play cricket.”
Tremain gradually made his way back via Premier Cricket with UNSW and then with NSW Second XI. He was picked in the Blues squad for the final Shield round before the Big Bash break, but didn’t play, and in discussions afterward, it became clear there was a lingering lack of belief that he could be relied on to perform as he once so consistently could.
“I was 12th man, and later found out that the confidence in in me being effective in that game was relatively low, and that if someone had gone down, they probably weren’t going to play me anyway,” he says. “Normally, that would be quite devastating feedback, however, when I got told that, I understood it – it was a no-brainer.”
Around that time Tremain approached Cricket NSW high-performance boss Greg Mail, and explained he had made the call that whichever way his comeback ended up going, he would be retiring at season’s end.
Then, towards the end of January, against Blacktown at David Phillips Oval, he battled through 4.2 overs but was noticing some familiar feelings.
“My shoulder just started acting up again, how it used to: small clunks in there and a few shooting pains,” he says. “It wasn’t any worse than what it had been, but it was the same … it wasn’t (progressing) at all.
“And it sort of dawned on me that, ‘Alright, we’re out of time – I’ve given this everything’.
“Later on that week, the more we spoke about it, the more it became evident that I wasn’t gonna play Shield cricket again. I wasn’t going to take someone else’s spot in Second XI, and I honestly didn’t feel like I could compete that well in club cricket anymore. So it was just time to go.
“Even up until that game, I thought we were close. That I could get there. But when that happened, it was almost like a 180 instant flick where I was like, ‘OK, we’re done’.”
Tremain was philosophical about the decision, having already come to terms with his cricketing mortality after almost 18 months of working his way through his unusual situation.
“It was always a reality that this was never going to work – even as optimistic as we were, it was always a very real possibility,” he says. “And so when it became reality, I wasn’t surprised, and therefore I wasn’t shocked, I wasn’t sad or disappointed or anything, because we’d given it everything – there was just nothing left to give by the end of it.”
Instead of helping his Blues at the pointy end of the season, Tremain will be working on his golf game, taking some time off and considering where his future might lie. He has already dabbled in coaching and commentary on the sport that leaves him with a catalogue of special memories.
It is 14 years now since the pace-bowling product from Yeoval in Central West New South Wales played the first of seven games in an initial stint with NSW, before a switch to Victoria ahead of the 2014-15 season changed everything.
“I’d felt unlucky to be delisted from New South Wales,” he once told cricket.com.au, “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.”
It was with the Vics that he enjoyed his most successful period, capturing 209 wickets in 54 Shield games and even hitting a first-class century as a nightwatcher. At the end of his maiden season in Melbourne, he was squeezed out of the Shield XI for the decider to accommodate the return from injury of Test quick James Pattinson, but he appeared in each of Victoria’s next three final triumphs.
“Winning Sheffield Shields was awesome – that was a cool thing,” he says. “And it wasn’t just winning the final, it was the whole thing – it’s a really good season thrown together, and even just moments in games, where you’ve taken a handful of wickets really quickly and turned the game on its head, things like that.”
In October 2016 Tremain was selected for Australia’s five-match ODI tour of South Africa. He played four games in 11 days and while the visitors lost each one and were ultimately beaten five-nil, he finished as his side’s leading wicket-taker, with seven. It was to be his lone taste of international cricket.
“I held my own,” he says. “It was going to be tough, but it was good fun. It was all new to me. But it was just, ‘try your best, see what happens’. The way I approached it wasn’t too much different to the way I approached most games of cricket.
“I do remember one really good memory from my first game. We were behind the over rate a little bit, I got Farhaan Behardien caught at deep midwicket, my first wicket, Davey Warner caught it, and everyone had to stay in their spots because we were behind the over rate. But Aaron Finch ran in from long-on, shook my hand and goes, ‘Well done, mate – no-one can ever take that from you’.
“Memories like that, they’re so much more important than the collective memory of an ODI tour.”
Victoria’s win over NSW in the 2018-19 Shield final capped off an incredible summer for Tremain in which he and teammates Cameron White and Marcus Harris became the first players to complete a domestic treble, with a final win for Victoria in the one-day cup and for Melbourne Renegades in the KFC Big Bash.
The paceman took two wickets in each of those white-ball finals, including Vics teammates Peter Handscomb and Glenn Maxwell in the Renegades’ stunning comeback win over Melbourne Stars.
“I actually never lost a final, but I do remember standing in the outfield during that game, and kind of going, ‘Well, it was bound to happen’,” he laughs. “That was a pretty remarkable day, just a strange day too – I guess finals are the games people come back to, and talk about, and that one’s just referred to as ‘that final’.”
Tremain took nine wickets in his final Shield match, against Queensland at Allan Border Field in March 2024, to reach 50 for the summer.
It was his best season for NSW after his return to his native state in 2020, and made him just the third bowler to complete multiple 50-wicket Shield campaigns.
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 as he hangs up the spikes for good, there are other impressive Shield records he can point to: he is one of only four bowlers to take 100-plus wickets for two states (Ray Lindwall, Chris Matthews and Matthew Nicholson are the others); and among the competition’s top 50 wicket-takers, only he and Bird boast a strike-rate below 50 as well as an average below 23.
He also holds the dubious distinction of being the bowler to have taken the most Shield wickets without ever having played a Test match.
“I was at peace with that a while back,” he says. “You always want to do it, but I didn’t mind that I hadn’t done it, and I don’t mind that I won’t do it … the colour of my hat, that doesn’t reflect the player that you are, and it sure as shit doesn’t reflect the person you are.”
