Page 2 of Dream On, Liar

Never sure of what answer I’d been hoping for.

My father didn’t know how to control—or maybe, he called it love—in halves. Everything with him was total. His attention, his expectations, his silence when I fell short. Cricket stopped being something I played as a kid, and became something I was shaped by, day after day, hour after hour, until there wasn’t much left that existed outside of it.

At thirteen, that kind of certainty felt like salvation.

And you don’t question the hand that steadies you when everything else shifts.

You don’t resist the structure when it’s the only thing keeping you upright.

So I let him.

I let him dictate my each choice. Refine my every move. Correct my missteps.

Until pleasing him felt like purpose.

Until every part of me that might have asked for something different quieted, then disappeared entirely.

What remained was simpler. Sharper. Easier to control.

Exactly what he wanted.

And by the time the world started calling it legacy, it no longer felt like something I could step away from, but something I learned not just to accept, but to perfect.

Precision over flair. Discipline over instinct. Control over everything.

It was the only way to make the comparisons quieter.

No matter the cost.

1

Rihaan

OVER THE COURSE OF my career, I’d been called a lot of things.

Cricket’s golden legacy. A legend in the making. World champion. The fastest bowler alive. Arrogant. Egotistical. Golden boy.

And this morning, I got a new title to add to the list.

A case study.

If you’ve never seen your entire career reduced to a few clinical paragraphs, published for the world to review and take apart—I don’t recommend working in a field that takes public scrutiny to another level.

There was something about the black-and-white text that striped everything down. No crowd noise, no context, no adrenaline to…drown it out. Just decisions, dissected like they meant nothing at the time.

I’d read the paper once.

Then again.

By the third time, I wasn’t reading anymore…I was memorising.

And every match I shouldn’t have played, every practised I’d pushed through, every PT I’d ignored and replaced, and every time I’d said I was fine when in reality deep down, I knew I wasn’t, replayed in my head like a broken record.

Case-Study in Risk: Ego-Driven Behaviour and Chronic Injury in Athletes

By Maeve Knox

My name hadn’t just been tossed in, hidden between the six thousand words of this paper, left for the world to read in between the lines.