Image source, Getty Images. ByKevin Howells, BBC cricket commentator and presenter and Matthew Henry, BBC Sport journalist. 10 minutes ago. Comments. It is 10 years since the day that changed James Taylor’s life forever.. Having been taken ill during a pre-season match for Leicestershire against Cambridge University, the England international batter drove back to Nottingham for a hastily arranged doctor appointment he hoped would clear up the issue.. “I should have died on that journey,” he tells BBC Sport.. “My body is packing up over the course of the next five hours. I’m grey and cold but sweaty too. I’m crawling because I can’t walk.. “I tried to get up some stairs but my body is packing up so I’m being sick everywhere.. “I get into bed in the fetal position and my shoulder is absolutely killing me.”. Taylor would soon be diagnosed with arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy (ARVC) – the heart condition that forced him to retire aged 26.. He had only been completing some throw-downs before the start of play, something he had done hundreds, probably thousands, of times before.. “I’m not even joking, I could physically see my shirt moving from my heartbeat,” he says.. “It felt like I was incredibly anxious but obviously I shouldn’t be.. “I make my way off the field because I think I’m going to be sick, think I’m going to pass out. I stuck my head down the loo and I’m not sick but I can’t breathe now.. “This was probably the only time in the whole process that I actually thought I might pass out or even die.”. ‘A lot of these cases are found in post-mortems’. 23 December 2016. ‘I thought I was going to die’. 1 May 2016. Taylor leaves England head scout role. 9 June 2022. On arriving home, Taylor called his doctor, who advised him to get to hospital as quickly as possible.. “Don’t wait for an ambulance, you haven’t got enough time,” he was told. It was later made clear his body was trying to save his vital organs.. “They put me on to this machine and I’ll never forget the sound that it made, going at 265 beats per minute,” Taylor says.. “It was also completely out of rhythm so it was incredible that I survived that.. “You’re meant to only be able to be conscious for 10 minutes of that and I’d gone nearly six hours.. “They said that what my heart had been through was the equivalent of five to six marathons.”. That winter Taylor had secured his place in England’s Test side throughout their series in South Africa, having scored his first international hundred at the end of the 2015 summer.. The diminutive middle-order batter took two sensational catches at short leg against the Proteas in Johannesburg.. Some were even talking about the former England Lions captain leading his country one day.. “I was so focused on keeping my place that I said to the main doctor, who luckily knew and loved his cricket, they just needed to get me right for three weeks’ time which was England against Sri Lanka at Lord’s,” says Taylor, who averaged a respectabl
