“My netball career is over.”
That was England shooter Eleanor Cardwell’s immediate thought when surgery failed on a significant knee injury.
The 31-year-old was recovering well from having snapped one meniscus and suffered a full root detachment of her lateral meniscus during a three-match series against Australia in October 2024.
But her first contact training session since the knee was repaired ended with another setback. As she leapt for the ball, Cardwell felt the cartilage again.
“Straight away I knew. I was like, ‘That’s it, it’s gone’,” she said.
“After the first surgery, my surgeon did tell me ‘If you do it again, you won’t ever be able to play netball again because we won’t be able to fix it’.
“So after that, I went into panic mode – thinking the worst, thinking ‘That’s it, I’m going to have to retire from netball’.”
Cardwell has won four Netball Super League (NSL) titles with Manchester Thunder and one Suncorp Super Netball (SSN) title in Australia with Adelaide Thunderbirds, as well as claiming a silver medal at the World Cup with England.
That stellar career seemed poised to come to a premature end, but Cardwell was not prepared to go out without a fight.
Seven months on from that low, she is back in the England squad as they take on New Zealand in a three-match series that begins on Saturday.