How Cricket dream was taken out of Essendon greats hands as a teenager

Essendon great Matthew Lloyd says he loved Cricket as much as football in his junior years.

While Lloyd was a prodigious football talent and went on to become one of the Bombers all-time greats, the former key forward says Cricket had an equal share of his heart.

Joining Essendon as a 16-year-old in the 1995 pre-season draft, Lloyd was forced to pick between his sports of choice earlier than most young Athletes after playing Cricket in his teenage years began to interrupt his budding AFL career.

I love my cricket, its my number two sport, Lloyd said on Sportsday.

It was my equal number one growing up, from the ages of 16 to 31 I couldn’t play.

I played a few early games when I was 16 when I was drafted to Essendon, and I got some stress fractures in my lower back.

The late great Dr Bruce Reid said, Youve got to give Cricket away, it (football) is your career now.

So as soon as my footy (career) ended, I was straight back into cricket.

While Lloyds Cricket dream was ultimately taken away from him by injury, he concedes that may not be a bad thing as he felt he was never good enough to make it as a professional.

I probably wasn’t going to be good enough, actually I shouldn’t say probably, I wasn’t good enough, Lloyd said.

At 16 I was given an AFL contract, so it was sort of taken out of my hands in a sense to chase that footy dream.

After retiring from his AFL career in 2009, Lloyd went back to Cricket playing for local club Bentleigh ANA in the South East Cricket Association.