For a man who had just been told he would be losing his left leg below the knee, Andy Moles was surprisingly upbeat.
‘My words to the specialist were, “You wouldn’t tell me how to play a forward defensive, so I’m not going to tell you how to amputate a foot”.’
The operation took place in early April in Cape Town, where Moles — the former Warwickshire opener who these days is director of cricket with Afghanistan — now lives.
Andy Moles had his left leg amputated after he got an infection during a 5km walk
And it was the culmination of a harrowing saga that began with a 5km walk in 47 degree heat in Abu Dhabi last summer, as the Afghans prepared for a trip to Bangladesh.
The walk took the skin off the sole of his left foot, which became infected. The healing process took five months, and Moles thought he was through the worst of it. Then, with Afghanistan in India to take on Ireland, the infection returned, and he flew back to South Africa for treatment. A course of antibiotics could not prevent the removal of his little toe. But worse was to come.
‘It turned out I’d contracted an MRSA bug in hospital,’ he tells Sportsmail. ‘It was resistant to antibiotics, and kept chewing away the flesh on my foot.
‘Then on April 4, I remember it vividly, a specialist came to me and said, “You’ve been fighting this for 10 days. If we don’t take drastic action, it could spread up the leg, and you could even get septicaemia”.
‘I had about half an hour of feeling sorry for myself, and a wobble of the bottom lip. But I was in hospital around the time the Covid lockdown in South Africa started, and one or two bodies were already being wheeled out. The reality is I would only be missing a lower left limb. Is it going to stop me walking? No. Will it stop me coaching? No.
Moles, who is the Afghanistan director of cricket, had the operation in early April in Cape Town
‘I just have to learn how to be mobile. I’m a very positive person.’
Moles has rarely done things the easy way. He was an opening batsman during an era of high-class new-ball attacks in county cricket, yet still averaged 40, scoring 29 first-class centuries and helping Warwickshire to a famous treble in 1994 — the year Brian Lara scored his unbeaten 501 against Durham. Were it not for an untimely achilles tendon injury in 1995, he might even have played Test cricket.
Since then, he has coached Kenya, Scotland and New Zealand, and in 2014 took the Afghanistan job, despite the concerns of his brother, who works in counter-terrorism.
‘It’s still a risk,’ he says. ‘I learned to travel at different times of day, to avoid the risk of terrorism or kidnapping. I don’t go out of the hotel or the office. You’ve got to be smart and think about what you’re doing. But I’ve been received very well in Afghanistan.
‘To a degree, the Taliban are happy with cricket, because they see it as a positive story for the country.’
The former Warwickshire opener scored 29 first-class centuries during his career
Now, the 59-year-old faces a challenge of a more personal kind, and he wants to use it to help others. He is currently using what he calls ‘half a mechanical leg — a peg leg, basically’, but will soon graduate to a carbon-fibre prosthetic, which he hopes will last five years. The new limb costs nearly £9,000, and he has had financial support from the Professional Cricketers’ Trust, the charitable arm of the PCA, where his former county team-mate Tim Munton has played a key role in helping him.
As part of the PCT’s #charity10for10challenge, Moles has pledged to walk 10km over the next month with the aid of a frame. When we spoke, he had already done 400m, and was about to do another 200m. And now he wants every professional cricketer, past and present, to raise funds for the PCT — which has been hit terribly during the pandemic — by taking on their own version of the challenge, and donating £10 each.
‘The game as a whole has been very kind to me,’ says Moles. ‘I thought I was bullet-proof back in the day when I was opening the batting, and I got to play with guys like Lara and Allan Donald. Now I’ve got injured, the PCT have come to my aid. They have been magnificent. I just have to be patient, which isn’t easy for me.’
The world of cricket will be urging him on.
Andy Moles’ JustGiving page for his 10km charity walk can be found HERE