Source : the age
Former Australian cricketer Will Pucovski has taken legal action against Brighton Grammar School, alleging that the elite private school mishandled the first of what became a career-ending series of concussions.
Pucovski’s management confirmed to this masthead the launching of legal action on Tuesday in the Victorian Supreme Court.
Brighton Grammar declined to comment as the matter is before the courts.
The statement of claim alleges that the APS school breached its duty of care when he was heavily concussed at a football training session in 2014, the first of 13 documented concussions that ultimately ended his cricket career.
He announced his retirement in April last year after a medical panel, comprising Cricket Australia and Cricket Victoria experts, recommended that he stop playing.
Prominent class action lawyer and former Western Bulldogs club president Peter Gordon is representing Pucovski, and has been advising him on his legal standing for several years.
Gordon also confirmed the lodgement of the statement of claim.
Pucovski, who played one Test for Australia in January 2021 against India at the SCG, left the game prematurely after a series of blows to the head, but his problems with concussions and their related effects began in high school.
Twelve years ago he was knocked unconscious at football training, when he suffered an accidental knee to the head. Pucovski, 28, has previously spoken about how he returned to the track very soon afterwards, before suffering months of flow-on effects from the concussion.
“I got sling tackled into ironically one of my best mate’s knees who was running the other way,” Pucovski said in July at a Lord’s Taverners function. “I literally got walked to the sidelines. And then my only memory was the coach coming up to me and being like, ‘Do you want to keep training?’
“I am like ‘Yeah’. So I just went and trained for the rest of the day. It is probably the biggest day of my life in a weird way because I have never felt the same since that day. I went from someone who would do anything and everything to basically sitting on the couch doing nothing for an extended period.”
What followed was a harbinger of many of the concussions Pucovski would suffer subsequently, intertwined with mental health struggles that at times became difficult to distinguish from the head knocks themselves.
“I got ‘foggy eyes’,” he told the Taverners function. “I’m like ‘I can’t see’, thinking I was just tired or fatigued or something, which turned out to be from the concussion.
“The next couple of days I just started to feel more sick, the headaches got worse and worse. Five or six days later I started feeling really, really sick and mum and dad took me to hospital. The mental health challenges started pretty quickly.”
Subsequently, Pucovski became an outstanding young top order batsman for Victoria, quickly taking him to the cusp of Australian selection – he was first picked in a squad in January 2019, before eventually making his debut two summers later.
Having made a polished half-century, Pucovski ran into further concussion troubles in subsequent seasons, preventing him from returning to the Australian team.
He made a final comeback for Victoria in the 2023-2024 season, sculpting a century in a Sheffield Shield game at the SCG. But he was struck another heavy blow to the helmet in a Shield game against Tasmania in Hobart later that season, a knock that took months to recover from, and he did not play again.
More recently, Pucovksi has worked as head coach of the Melbourne Cricket club, while also doing commentary work for Seven. He was part of the commentary team for the first Test against Bangladesh in Darwin earlier this month.
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Daniel Brettig is The Age’s chief cricket writer and the author of several books on cricket.Connect via X.
