Little’s international career was almost derailed before it even properly began.
He once cried off a game for an interprovincial fixture for Leinster Lightning so he could go to a festival called Electric Picnic – dubbed ‘Ireland’s Glastonbury’.
“This festival came around and all my friends were going,” said Little, who made his T20 debut for Ireland in September 2016 as a 16-year-old.
“They just said ‘look, you have to find a way out of going’. I just messaged my coach and I said ‘I’m not available this weekend’.”
Socialising, drinking and people could have led Little astray.
But a conversation with the then Ireland coach Graham Ford brought matters to a head.
Ford said he saw “something special” in Little and urged him to “choose cricket” and change his lifestyle to “make a lot of money in this game”, saying “I can see that you are talented”.
Little cleaned up his act.
“From that moment on, I think I lost about 20 kilos, basically stopped drinking,” he said.
“I was as lean as an Olympic boxer, which is too lean for what I needed to do. That was sort of the turning point in my career to to sort of progress “
