Amanda-Jade Wellington is still working out what “normal” now feels like, yet last weekend she managed something anything but: her first senior hat-trick, tucked inside a five-for that buried Essex in the Vitality Blast.
The Australian leg-spinner has lived with supraventricular tachycardia (SVT) since childhood. The condition, an electrical fault in the heart, sends the pulse racing without warning. In February she finally opted for an ablation – a procedure in which surgeons thread a catheter through a vein (usually the groin) and cauterise the troublesome tissue so the rhythm can settle down.
Three months later she was wheeling away at Chelmsford, celebrating wickets three, four and five in consecutive balls. “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.”
Key numbers look healthy too. Since joining Hampshire in December she has 11 wickets from eight 50-over matches at 29.18, conceding just over four an over. In the Blast she doubled her tally in that single game to reach ten, and Tuesday’s eight-wicket win at Blackpool nudged the figure to 11 at 16.00, economy 7.33. Solid rather than spectacular on paper, but the hat-trick headline feels bigger given what sits behind it.
The days immediately after surgery were, understandably, odd. “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.”
Wellington had never been under general anaesthetic before and the prospect of someone tinkering inside her heart was, in her own words, “quite scary”. She and her partner, Humraj, talked through worst-case scenarios on the eve of the operation. “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’.”
Support came quickly from South Australia team-mates. “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. 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 sense of safety has travelled north with her. She speaks warmly of Hampshire’s dressing room – a group that seems less worried about overseas reputations and more about the well-being of the individual inside the playing shirt. The franchise, battling for a top-four finish, gets an in-form tweaker and an energetic fielder; Wellington gets minutes in the middle without the nagging fear of a runaway heartbeat.
Specialists warn that ablation isn’t always a silver bullet. Sometimes rogue pathways re-grow or new ones appear. Wellington knows that, yet the confidence boost of an apparently steady pulse – not to mention a career-first hat-trick – has her eyeing a full Australian recall. She hasn’t bowled for the national side since 2022. “Selection takes care of itself” is the standard line but, privately, every performer wants another crack at yellow and green.
Technique-wise, little has changed. She remains a classic leg-spinner: high release, generous spin, a googly that isn’t telegraphed. If anything the post-op fitness block in a freezing Southampton spring sharpened the run-up, helping her finish closer to the stumps and drag batters into playing. A simpler heartbeat may have produced a simpler action.
Cricket, inevitably, moves on quickly. Hat-tricks fade, fixtures pile up and talk turns to the next double-header. Wellington’s story, though, hovers on a wider theme: how elite sport and hidden health issues often rub against each other. The ablation wasn’t performance-enhancing, just life-enhancing. The fact that life immediately produced five wickets in 13 balls is a neat, almost comic, bonus.
What’s next? More Blast games, a possible Finals Day, then the Australian domestic season. The schedule is full, and so, finally, is the leg-spinner’s tank.
For now, she is simply enjoying that steady internal metronome. “It is quite scary going into surgery,” she admits, “but I feel fantastic.”
