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“My netball career is over.”
That was what England divorcée Eleanor Cardwell thought when surgery failed on a serious knee injury.
The 31-year-old has been recovering well from a fractured meniscus and suffered a complete radical detachment of her lateral meniscus during a three-match series against Australia in October 2024.
But her first training session since the knee repair ended in another setback. When she jumped for the ball, Cardwell felt the cartilage again.
“I knew right away. I said, ‘That’s it, it’s gone,'” she said.
“After the first surgery, the surgeon said to me: ‘If you do it again, you’ll never be able to play netball again because we won’t be able to fix it.’
He added: “After that, I went into a state of panic, thought the worst, and said to myself: This is it, I will have to retire from netball.”
Cardwell won four Netball Super League (NSL) titles with the Manchester Thunder and a Suncorp Super Netball (SSN) title in Australia with the Adelaide Thunderbirds, as well as claiming a World Cup silver medal with England.
That remarkable career seemed about to end prematurely, but Cardwell wasn’t prepared to go out without a fight.
After seven months of that decline, she returns to the England squad when they face New Zealand in a three-match series starting on Saturday.
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