“You feel like he’s been cut short by a decade,” said one source with knowledge of talks, speaking anonymously because negotiations were confidential.

CV said: “Will has all the information to make a decision.”

CA, the ACA and Pucovski’s management declined to comment, nor divulge the name of the legal firm representing him.

Picked for Australia at 20 and opening the batting in an SCG Test against India at 22, Pucovski appeared to be headed for a major role in the national cricket team.

Instead, his brief time in the cricket spotlight may leave a different legacy, by creating a framework for players to be compensated in the event of a forced early retirement from the game through concussion.

Were Pucovski simply to announce that he had retired, he would be entitled to little more than the paying out of his remaining contract, renewed for 12 months by CV earlier this year.

Australian sport has never been subject to workers’ compensation laws, a state of affairs that has existed since the 1970s and the first flowering of athletics pursuits as professions. Cricketers, in fact, donned helmets in part because they dared not risk injuries like the broken jaw that befell the late David Hookes in 1977 thanks to an Andy Roberts bouncer, costing Hookes valuable playing time and match fees from Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket.

In terms of insurance, contemporary Australian players kept out of cricket by injury are eligible for the recompense of up to two years of missed match fees. The match fees stand apart from retainers baked into central contracts and paid irrespective of how many games are played.

The AFL players’ super fund includes a total and permanent disability clause, offering significant payments to those eligible. Players have access to two different insurance policies. The AFLPA’s injury and hardship fund also caters for a career-ending injury payout, for which the age of player and the value of their contract are used to calculate the payout value: the younger the player, the bigger the payout.

Pucovski has also faced mental health struggles, about which he has also been very open.

The medical panel that previously cleared Pucovski to play in 2022 concluded in part: “The panel’s overwhelming conclusion was that some of the previous injuries sustained had involved low trauma force and therefore were most likely not true concussion, but a form of either post-traumatic migraine or stress-related response.”

Australian cricket was looking for new heroes during the 2018-19 season in which Pucovski was first called into the Australian Test squad. This was the summer of bans for Steve Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft, for their parts in the sandpaper scandal.

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The Test team struggled for runs, and by sculpting 243 against Western Australia in Perth that October, Pucovski vaulted to the front of the queue of top-order aspirants. Not since Doug Walters had a Shield double century been scored by so young an Australian cricketer.

But even within that game, Pucovski was battling with his mental health, and took a break shortly thereafter.

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