Mohammed Shami is currently on the road to recovery he tries to speed up his India comeback after being on the shelf due to an ankle injury. Shami, the leading wicket-taker of the 2023 ODI World Cup, had to undergo surgery for the same, forcing him to miss the IPL 2024 and the T20 World Cup. But as his social media posts indicate, Shami is on the fast track to making his India comeback and could be up and running the Test series against New Zealand at home in October.

The period between December 2023 and now is one of the longest that Shami has been out of action, and he has expressed his frustrations behind it. Being one of the 15 whose hearts were broken on the night of November 19, Shami would have loved to be part of India's World Cup winning captain last month. But as it turns out, fate had other plans. Shami may or may not get to be a world champions sometime in the future, but it isn't something he is losing sleep after.

Setbacks aren't new to Shami. He has had his shares of rough cards dealt to him previously. The world knows how Shami battles all the odds to come out of the personal turmoil that haunted him for years. The ugly fallout with his former wife Hasin Jahan, the match fixing allegations, fighting domestic abuse, contemplating suicide and what not, Shami has witnessed it all. In fact, one such near-fatal instance took place right after Shami was freed of all the charges. In 2018, as Shami and his closer friend Umesh Kumar were road-tripping, they met with a horrific car accident that could well have ended their lives.

"Shami had gotten a clean chit, and we decided to go to Dehradun. We saw death very closely that night. We reached Dehradun, stayed there, practiced at a stadium, and were on our way back. We left around 5:30 AM in the morning. We fell asleep on the journey. Suddenly it felt as if the car was completely shattered. By the time we could control ourselves, Shami's face was covered in blood, and he was injured badly. There was a lot of blood," Umesh told Shubhankar Mishra on his podcast 'Unplugged'.

'The most dangerous thing was…'

If the morning Umesh saw Shami standing on the balcony of his 19th floor apartment wasn't scary enough, this mishap shook Shami and Umesh to their core. Umesh revealed that a truck had collided with their vehicle, and the impact was such that it inflicted heavy damage on the car, but thankfully, not to the two passengers inside it. While it may not have been as serious as the car crash Rishabh Pant found himself in, it was a bit of a life and death situation, as Umesh points out.

"A truck hit our car from the front. The truck hit from the front indicator and tore the side of the car to the rear indicator. The most dangerous thing was that while trying to escape, the truck driver even hit our escort car. When our car got imbalanced and went off-road, there was a transformer within two meters of distance. There was a ditch on one side and a transformer in the front," he said.

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