4 min readMumbaiUpdated: Mar 8, 2026 11:57 PM IST
India were 203 for 1 in the 15 overs. Not building toward something unreachable — already there. Sanju Samson and Ishan Kishan had been dismantling the New Zealand attack for so long that the question wasn’t whether India would post an impossible total, only how impossible. Then Jimmy Neesham bowled one over.
Samson. Kishan. Suryakumar Yadav, first ball. Three wickets. The over that had begun with India’s boot on New Zealand’s throat ended with a game.
Neesham walked back to his mark each time the way he always does: unhurried, unrevealing. Everything had changed. He didn’t particularly show it.
* * *
Sometime in 2017, Neesham would wake on match mornings, open the shades of his hotel room, and hope for rain.
“Hoping it was raining is not the ideal way to be starting a day of cricket,” he said.
He decided to quit the game. Heath Mills, the head of New Zealand Cricket’s player association, had been watching. He had seen talented players struggle before — Jesse Ryder among them — and had learned to recognise the signs early. He got in touch.
“I had observed him and suspected that he was struggling mentally,” Mills had told The Indian Express. “I got in touch with him and we started talking.”
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The situation worsened over the following weeks. Neesham called Mills to say he was done. Mills had a different suggestion: not a decision, just a break. Four or five weeks. See how it feels then.
“He had had enough of cricket and wasn’t in a good space at all,” Mills said. “Sometimes well-meaning people close to players tell them to work harder, keep playing, and things will work through. Often it’s the worst advice. Sometimes it’s best to get away from that environment.”
Neesham agreed. He went to see a psychologist, Paula Dennan, in Auckland. “I think I got to the point where I needed to have a full overhaul of the way I was approaching the game,” he said, “and she facilitated that.”
What needed overhauling, he later explained, was the obsessing. “In the past I was looking at the scoreboard every ball thinking I’ve got to get 30-plus to guarantee my spot in the next series.” The break gave him distance from that. “There’s a difference between knowing that and obsessing over it.”
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When he came back, Mills told him to take one game at a time. “The transformation was quick. I remember there were a couple of games where I could sense that he was enjoying cricket. That’s half the battle.”
On social media, Neesham presents as someone for whom nothing is too heavy — wit deployed casually, a wisecrack always within reach, the persona of a man entirely at ease. Mills knows what that can obscure.
“Some people find it difficult to reconcile how such a person can be hit by depression. But if there is one thing I know for sure now, it’s that you never know about someone. What you perceive from TV or social media may be quite different. I never judge now. Just because somebody seems to be doing well doesn’t mean anything.”
Tonight, in Ahmedabad, Neesham took three wickets in one over and walked back to his mark each time like a man running through a checklist. Samson gone. Kishan gone. Suryakumar, first ball, gone. Shivam Dube took 24 off his final over. That’s how his career has often gone. Neesham has had to always give something back.
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He had once opened his hotel blinds and hoped for rain. Tonight he ran in and asked for the ball again.
