Australia all-rounder John Hastings retires after mystery illness

Melbourne, November 13: A mystery illness where his lungs gets filled up with blood has forced Australia all-rounder John Hastings to draw the curtain on his cricket career.

Hastings, who represented Australia in all three formats, revealed last month that he would miss this year's KFC Big Bash League season due to the illness after signing with the Sydney Sixers.

The 33-year-old Hastings will now focus on his media commitments. "I've gone through an extensive testing process," Hastings told the Fairfax Media.

"I suppose the important thing to note is that I'm actually in good health. I've gone through stress tests and bronchoscopes, and angiogram bronchoscopes and all this sort of stuff. It's been quite invasive, and lengthy I guess. It's (only) when I bowl. The pressure at the crease, little blood vessels in my lungs burst.

"That determines that I cough up blood on a regular basis when I'm trying to bowl. It's a really scary thing. I'm training now, doing F45, lifting weights or boxing it doesn't happen. It's really only the pressure of the actual landing of bowling.

"There was just a lot of grey area surrounding long-term health, whether it was causing any damage, and if there was any potential to have a fatal bleed on the field. They just really couldn't say yes or no. And I wasn't happy with that."

"It's just something that they can't say, 'look, you're not going to have a fatal bleed on the field' or it's not going to cause long-term damage," he told RSN's the Breakfast Club in October.

"It's pretty shattering. I've come to terms with it now, but over the last four or five months it's been a very, very tough period.

"I've played this game my whole life and I wanted to keep playing it. I wanted to play tournaments all around the world. That's one of the reasons I retired early from one-day and four-day cricket."

The muscular Hastings has who played one Test, nine Twenty20s and 29 one-day internationals and he had made his ODI debut against India in 2010. He last played for Australia in 2016, in a T20I match against Sri Lanka in Colombo.