Amanda-Jade Wellington is only just settling into what she calls her “new normal”, yet the leg-spinner keeps finding ways to surprise everyone else.
Three months ago the 29-year-old Australian underwent an ablation to address supraventricular tachycardia (SVT) – a heart rhythm disorder that had shadowed her since childhood. During the procedure, surgeons guided a catheter through a vein to her heart and cauterised tiny areas of tissue, blocking the faulty electrical signals that had caused sudden, rapid beating.
Last weekend at Chelmsford she produced a maiden hat-trick – three wickets in as many balls – on the way to 5 for 12, steering Hampshire past Essex in the Vitality Blast. The figures instantly doubled her T20 tally for the season; after Tuesday’s eight-wicket win over Lancashire Thunder at Blackpool the ledger reads 11 wickets at 16.00, economy 7.33.
Those numbers sit alongside a solid One-Day Cup campaign: 11 wickets in eight outings at 29.18, conceding only 4.19 runs an over. Not bad for someone still working out how a steady heartbeat actually feels.
“I feel fantastic,” Wellington says. “I’m in a really good place. I’ve been able to feel my heart completely different now. It’s weird. I can feel it beating normally, which is definitely not normal for me.”
The mental adjustment has been almost as big as the physical one.
“The first couple of days coming out of the hospital, I would have to sit down and acknowledge it because my heart was beating weird and I was like, ‘This is actually normal.’ It feels so different to what it used to.”
She signed for Hampshire last December, went under the knife in March and, by early April, was jogging through a brisk Southampton morning preparing for the domestic summer. The time between diagnosis and surgery, she admits, was heavy.
“It is quite scary going into surgery, I’ve never been under (anaesthetic) as well, so the feeling of going in, having heart surgery, is quite scary and you just never know,” she says. “I remember I was talking to my partner the day before. I was like, ‘If anything happens… we’ve got to have this chat just in case.’”
Cricket, and the people around it, provided a cushion.
“I got the news from the doctor about getting surgery and I rocked up to training the next day and I broke down in tears and all the girls hugged me,” she says. “I think the tears came from, one, I was scared, two, that I was actually in a safe environment to feel my feelings and deal with it because it’s a bloody big thing, and three, I think it was just finally having that support around me to be vulnerable.”
That support now extends across two hemispheres. South Australia have long viewed her as a linchpin of their attack; Hampshire coach Charlotte Edwards and captain Georgia Adams see the same value. Both have spoken privately about the energy Wellington injects into the dressing-room, her willingness to bowl in tough phases and the extra dimension a quality wrist-spinner offers on English pitches that slow through June.
From a tactical standpoint, the hat-trick highlighted her growing range. The first dismissal, Essex opener Grace Poole, came via flight that lured the drive; the second was a quicker, straighter ball speared into the pads; the third a traditional leg-break that gripped. Three deliveries, three distinct skills – evidence her variations survive the condensed Blast schedule.
Fittingly, Wellington downplays the achievement. She talks instead about timing her peak for later in the season, keeping her action compact and, away from the game, rediscovering ordinary routines most athletes take for granted: sleeping without palpitations, jogging without fear of a sudden spike.
There is, of course, an Ashes winter on the horizon. Australia’s selectors are spoiled for wrist-spin options – Alana King and Georgia Wareham among them – yet Wellington’s county stint doubles as a quiet audition. A consistent stretch of white-ball wickets in unfamiliar conditions will be hard to ignore.
For now, though, the goal is simpler: keep Hampshire in knockout contention and keep trusting that steady, unfamiliar rhythm in her chest. The extraordinary can wait; ordinary finally feels good enough.
