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Coulter-Nile holds on to Baggy Green dream

Talented quick concedes he nearly turned his focus to T20 cricket after a horror run of injuries

Nathan Coulter-Nile has revealed just how close he came to turning his back on Australian cricket before being included in the limited-overs squads to tour India.

The 29-year-old quick, lightning fast and one of the more athletic fielders going around, has had a horror run with injuries over the past few years, but made a successful comeback in this year's Indian Premier League with the Kolkata Knight Riders.

Cut from Cricket Australia's central contract list for the 2017-18 season he understandably pondered his future. While injuries made him a regular on the rehab bench, the appearances Coulter-Nile did make were often overseas. He was out of sight, out of mind for the Australian cricket public.

"I lost my Australian contract and Greg Chappell came on as a selector (in a new role) and we all know he's got a big youth focus," Coulter-Nile told Seven West Media

"I was having a good IPL at the time so I thought I could probably just do this. I thought it might be time just to focus on forging a career in T20s.

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"On reflection and thinking about it and speaking to JL (Justin Langer) and blokes like that, I just thought I really want to play Test cricket. 

"That was my dream as a kid and it's still my dream now. The desire was there and JL said look there's 400-odd players who have ever played Test cricket for Australia. 

"It's not something just to pass off lightly. After thinking about it for a good while I decided to give it another crack."

Coulter-Nile played eight matches for Kolkata in the IPL, returning 15 wickets at 15.2 and earning lofty praise from former Australia skipper Ricky Ponting.

Ponting backs forgotten man Coulter-Nile

"He's a highly-talented player and he's probably someone who's been a little bit forgotten in Australian cricket because he's been injured so much," Ponting told cricket.com.au in April.

"We didn't see him at all last season (2016-17) domestically, but the year before that we'd seen him in the Australian one-day and T20 teams and he was on the fringe of playing some Test cricket as well.

"Anyone who can bowl above 140kph and swing the ball in India is going to make an impact.

"It's not what the Indian top-order players are used to seeing and even for overseas top-order players, you've still got to be good enough to score runs and not get out against high-quality fast-bowling like Coulter-Nile's."

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Even so, the call from the selectors that he had been included in the squad to tour India came as a surprise, but the bowler hopes his injury worries are behind him now.

That injury run started in the 2014 IPL, when an innocuous slide in the field while representing Delhi Daredevils saw him tear his left hamstring.

Coulter-Nile suffers IPL injury

It required surgery, and ruled him out of a mid-2014 ODI tour to Zimbabwe, costing him the spot in the national side he had won earlier that year in five matches against England.

An outstanding Matador Cup to open the 2014-15 summer saw him return to the ODI team with an eye on the World Cup, until he injured the hamstring again in a match against South Africa at the MCG.

He returned to the ODI team for three matches in the UK in mid-2015, before the hamstring problem struck again – the right one this time. A month later he hurt his left shoulder landing awkwardly in a domestic one-day cup warm-up match. 

Then perhaps the cruellest blow of them all: having earned a call-up to Australia's Test squad to take on the West Indies and in line for a Boxing Day debut, he dislocated his right shoulder after a fall fielding in the KFC BBL.

Nathan Coulter-Nile leaves field with injury

He returned to feature in the 2016 World T20 and played three more ODIs in a Caribbean tri-series and earned Test squad selection for the Sri Lanka tour. But having been confined to the training track during the Tests, he was sent home during the ODI leg of the tour and diagnosed with a bone stress fracture.

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"I had a really long, conservative rehab so hopefully that holds me in good stead," Coulter-Nile said.

"I just had my last scan on my back before I start playing games again and that was all clear."

With a fit and firing Coulter-Nile in the fold, Australian cricket boasts an embarrassment of pace riches in an Ashes summer. 

An Ashes call-up, with names like Starc, Hazlewood, Cummins and Pattinson in the fold, may require a slice of fortune to fall his way but none can argue that he doesn't deserve it.

"I don't think there's any reason I can't play (Test cricket)," he said. "It's just whether or not the opportunity is there."