Getting the meals right – Green on kidney condition & Ashes hopes

Speak to an injured sportsperson and they will often tell you there are positives to their enforced absence – a chance to reset, to get in the gym and spend time with family.

For some, the benefits are more significant than others.

“Spending time at home, you can get into really good routines in the way you eat,” Australia all-rounder Cameron Green tells BBC Sport.

“When you are on the road, it can be really hard to get kidney-friendly meals.”

Towering above you at 6ft 6in with the broadest of broad frames, Green looks every inch a cricketer. Failing that, an Olympic champion from the coxless four.

Such kidneys do not get better. There is no cure.

“A lot of people have a lot of different problems you don’t know about,” Green says.

“I find it really doesn’t impact my life that much. I just make good decisions, basically.

“The kidneys don’t heal themselves but there are certain ways to reduce how they do go. As long as I stay on top of it, I should be fine.”

Keeping on top of such issues is not easy when cricket’s calendar has you on the road for 10 months of the year, switching between hotel rooms in Melbourne, Manchester, Brisbane and Bangalore.

“I actually got helped out beautifully when I was in Bangalore [at the Indian Premier League], especially,” said Green.

“I had a better idea about how I wanted to go about it and I got in contact with the head chef there and had a direct line.

“I basically called him up and had a spreadsheet of four meals. I think it was a spaghetti bolognese, regular chicken and rice, a poke bowl and maybe one more.”

Green has not had such issues for the past seven months.

A back injury in September led to surgery in October and an Australian summer at home in Perth.

He was able to return to the gym in November, began running again in January and was in the nets in February, albeit having been told not to play certain shots because of the strain it would put on his back.

Green is now ready for his return and he will do so across five matches for Gloucestershire in the County Championship, starting on Friday against Kent.

When his signing was announced last month, it was revealed a mystery benefactor among the club’s membership had helped fund the move.

“I found out when it was in the paper,” says Green, who helpfully has an apartment in Bristol with a kitchen for the next six weeks.

“George Bailey [Australia’s chief selector and former batter] sent me a text joking about how much they must be paying me if they needed a mystery person.

Whoever stumped up the cash, Green’s arrival is mutually beneficial.

Gloucestershire get a player Australia hope will be a fixture in their XI for a generation.

Green gets competitive cricket in England and a chance to prove his form and fitness before the World Test Championship final against South Africa at Lord’s in June.

He will not bowl during his county stint, instead playing solely as a batter as Australia carefully manage his return given the year to come.

“It is probably working backwards from the Ashes,” he says.

“That is the plan. There is not a whole lot of cricket between July and the Ashes so they just thought ‘give you an extra couple of months rest’.

“There is no real rush to get back.”

Green admits his first taste of playing in England was a “learning experience”. He scored 103 runs and took five wickets in the drawn 2023 Ashes and by the end of the series had lost his place to Mitchell Marsh.

There is a reason Green excites the Australian hierarchy in a way few others ever have, however.

At his best he is a genuine fast-bowling all-rounder, something Australia has long craved.

You have to go back to Keith Miller or Richie Benaud, whose careers followed World War Two, for the last truly great Aussie all-rounder.

In that time, England have produced three icons in Ian Botham, Andrew Flintoff and Ben Stokes.

“The Australian public have a really high expectation on their cricketers and see their all-rounders as having to perform in both,” Green says.

“You look at someone like Shane Watson. He had an incredible career but is not put in the same category as others.

“The public expects you to average 40 with the bat and 30 with the ball to be considered elite, even though that is elite and almost unattainable.”

At present, Green’s statistics stand outside of that – an average of 36.23 with the bat and 35.31 as a bowler – although they are not dissimilar to Stokes’.

In his last Test series before the injury he scored 174 not out against New Zealand, batting at number four with Steve Smith pushed up to open to accommodate him.

The Smith-opener experiment has since been shelved and a log-jam created in the middle order after impressive debuts by Josh Inglis and Beau Webster, who will fight for spots alongside Smith, Travis Head and Marsh.

It leaves Green with work to do to get back into the XI for the Test final and then the Ashes, which begins in his home city on 21 November.

“I am just here trying to perform as well as I can every game,” Green says. “I am grateful for every chance I get at an Ashes or any Test, to be honest.

“Maybe that is a difference between Australia and here.

“Two years before they were going to play in Australia, they were already talking about it.

“I feel like that is a little bit draining. You have got to stay pretty present.”