As it turned out, the answers were yes, and no.
Something clicked for Johnson only two overs into the series, when he opted to bowl around the wicket, to a spread field. A sensational bowler who went through massive peaks and troughs, he suddenly found he could take wickets with his bad balls. Confidence surged; by the end, he was in complete control. Harris would be forced to retire in 2015 through a knee injury, but these were the days of his life.
The part of my brain that deals in logic, analytical thought and reasoning was occupied by the fragile, overarching goals of the tour. The other part, more creative, and focused on such things as imagination, intuition, insight and holistic thought, was devoted to Trotty’s plight. In short, could I have done any more to help?
It is something I wrestle with to this day. My mind keeps returning to a session with the bowling machine during the warm-up period in Sydney. It is one of my major regrets that I never stopped it. Trotty seemed to be intent on purging himself. He turned the machine up to top speed and was being hit all over the body. It was alarming, unprecedented in my experience for its wilful destructiveness.
I didn’t have the confidence or ability to do my job as a leader. I knew he was struggling mentally, and confiding in Mark Saxby, the masseur with whom he had a strong relationship, but I failed to appreciate the extent of the problem. In the later years of my captaincy I would have been more forceful and proactive, and demanded to be allowed into the inner circle.
Trotty has subsequently admitted to me that he regrets not sharing his issues, because he didn’t want to burden me. That’s where self-containment, encouraged and almost demanded by international sport, works against the individual. He later wrote of having his male dignity stripped away by his perceived inability to deal with the short ball.
There is a tightrope strung between leaving someone alone and trusting them to do things their way, and wrapping them in cotton wool. This, remember, was a senior player who had been part of three Ashes-winning teams. He had scored one helluva lot of runs over forty-seven Tests. Without being specific about Trotty, you can’t mollycoddle anyone in Test cricket.
I get on really well with the bloke. I love him to bits. I didn’t spot the warning signs early enough. I should have knocked on his door and talked through everything in as much detail as he could stand. Instead, I relied on those passing, inconsequential conversations that make up so much of the day.
‘You all right, Trotty?’
‘Yeah, yeah, good. Just battling a few things.’
He always battled things. That’s what made him so good, his OCD, his single-minded pursuit of brilliance. Obsessed by the minutiae of the game, he would measure his pads to the millimetre. He was visibly driven to put in a performance for himself, his parents, his team. His determination and desire were as ferocious as his demons. His autobiography, Unguarded, which revealed relentless self-imposed pressure to please his mum and dad, makes sobering reading.
I prefer to remember our classic unbeaten partnership of 329 in Brisbane, three years earlier. Andrew Strauss had made 110 in our opening stand of 188. Trotty and I were similar in terms of the deliberation of our approach, but he was meticulous beyond reason. He loved the cadence of our batting until we declared just before tea on the final day.
We were 517–1. That was one hell of an achievement. The locals had voted with their feet, so the Gabba was colonized by the Barmy Army. One of the tabloid boys got a bit overexcited, compared it to England’s World Cup win in 1966, and suggested that Trotty and I ‘didn’t just occupy the crease – they built holiday homes on it’. Even Graham Gooch wandered out to take a photograph of the scoreboard for posterity.
Strauss 110. Trott 135. Cook 235. England 517. Magic numbers.
Like most of us, Trotty learned on the job. He rarely drank, unless it was in celebration at the end of a series, when he gave it a little nudge. He realized, very quickly, very early in his career, that his lifestyle had to be tailored to his ambitions as an elite professional.
There is a sharp dividing line between the pressure you put on yourself to excel and the pressure you put on yourself to be a good husband, father and teammate. Is there something about cricket, the long hours and extended absence from home, that makes suppressing things that bit more damaging? Probably.
Cricket is such a time-consuming game. Retirement, for many players, is challenging because the game leaves a void. We are unaccustomed to having a lot of downtime. It is not like a rugby or football player, who trains between two games a week. Our respite tends to come during matches, when the opposition is in the field, but even then, the variables of form preoccupy the mind.
I’m not qualified to talk about the intricacies of depression, or provide a clinical analysis of the condition, but any sport forces you into a negative space quite a lot of the time, because you invariably fail. Athletes in all disciplines have been more forthcoming about the strain in recent years; cricket has become more open in the decade or so since Marcus Trescothick laid himself bare.
In no particular order, Andrew Flintoff, Monty Panesar, Sarah Taylor, Graeme Fowler, Michael Yardy, Steve Davies, Graham Thorpe, Steve Harmison, Tim Ambrose and Iain O’Brien have all spoken about mental-health issues. In itself that’s unsurprising, since research has suggested that, on average, around 15 per cent of elite athletes suffer similarly.
High achievers, high stakes, high pressure.
I wouldn’t want to dwell on individuals, because that is personal territory and involves specialist knowledge. My issues were not of that magnitude, though when I was really struggling for runs, and dealing with the fallout from the Kevin Pietersen affair, I was not in a good place. I rarely argue with Alice, since we are not that type of couple, but I was taking out some of the pressure on her.
I felt alone, exposed. In that state of mind, it is easy to forget that strain also affects those closest to you. The ECB organize a box for players’ families, and offer a crèche, but the elephant in the room is individual form. There is always someone whose partner is under pressure. Conversely, there is also someone whose loved one is absolutely flying, relishing life, scoring runs or taking wickets. The extremes of concern and joy make things complicated when they are expressed in close proximity.
It doesn’t matter, in a way, that the wheel tends to turn. No one is a media darling for ever. Anyone who cannot contribute consistently is liable to fade away. Our families live our cricket, and deal with the consequences, without direct influence on the outcome. That’s difficult when, understandably enough, they identify with your dreams, and are desperate for you to do well.
They offer comfort in the toughest of times. I reached my lowest point in the second Test against Sri Lanka in June 2014. We had a first-innings lead of 108, and my captaincy was fiercely criticized when we allowed Angelo Mathews, their captain, to accumulate 160 when the game was in the balance.
Angelo is a gutsy cricketer, with an ability to play a special innings. We were conscious of his potential to hurt us, and attempted to frustrate him when he was joined, with seven wickets down for 277, by Rangana Herath. Reasoning that the tail-ender was unlikely to score the runs required to set us a testing target, I spread the field for the first four or five balls every over, inviting the skipper to expose him.
The tactical strategy worked, to a degree, because Angelo nicked off a huge drive, which dropped an inch short of second slip. My mistake was in persisting too long with it; Herath made 48 before he was run out by Joe Root, and the Sri Lankans set us 350 to win.
I was first out, for 16, in that evening session on the fourth day. At the close we were five down, with only 57 on the board. Dear old Shane Warne was playing to the gallery by suggesting my leadership was ‘horrific’ and the worst he had ever seen. It was more of the same, sniping and toxicity, with an obvious subplot.
Thank goodness my family were with me that night. Alice had been following the scores, and drove up to Yorkshire that afternoon because she sensed
I needed support. I was as close as I had ever been to quitting, drained physically and mentally. Conflicting images and messages rattled around my brain as I paced around our hotel room holding Elsie, who was barely three months old, in my arms.
I idly watched highlights from the opening day of Wimbledon as I lulled her to sleep, a comforting process with which any parent can identify. Alice urged me to stay with it, arguing that it was against my nature to give up. She was right. Stubborn to a fault, I didn’t want to be known as a quitter. It was against everything that I had been brought up to believe and express.
Trevor Bayliss, the England coach, has a saying: whatever happens, the next morning the sun rises; you get up and get on with it. My sense of calmness and renewed purpose even survived a mortifying defeat when Jimmy Anderson, who had batted without scoring for eighty-one minutes during twenty overs in which Moeen Ali completed his maiden century, fended Shaminda Eranga to Herath at leg gully. Sri Lanka had won with a ball to spare.
I felt so badly for Jimmy, who, despite being named man of the series, was in tears during the post-match ceremonies. England’s greatest bowler could not forgive himself for falling just short when his most singular achievement as a batsman was within reach. We might have been an odd couple when thrown together a decade earlier, but we have many things in common, including owing our promotion to the misfortune of others.
That tends to be the way of things in international cricket. I was first called up by England in 2005, when I was with the Academy squad at Loughborough, ironically training against reverse swing, a Pakistani speciality. I was indoors on the bowling machine before bowlers were introduced, to mind-blowing effect.
They used a ball with one pristine side and the other roughed up. It was doing all sorts, nigh on impossible to play. When I was pulled out and told to get to Multan because Michael Vaughan had injured his knee in the final warm-up match before the first Test, I momentarily panicked. I pleaded to be fed a diet of underarm deliveries, just so that I could get the feel of bat on ball again.
It was a surreal few days. It was the first time I’d heard my name on Radio 1, which was pretty cool for a twenty-one-year-old. I drove to Reading University to see Alice before submitting myself to the tender mercies of Pakistan Airways. Within twenty minutes of reporting to the team hotel I was invited into the Harmison Arms.
Steve would suffer severe homesickness but here, in a hotel room that acted as the centre of our universe, he was in his element. He ensured I didn’t have time to remain awestruck at being alongside the Ashes heroes I had so recently watched on TV. I was quickly playing darts for the first time in my life and eating the sweets and snacks he had taken instead of his cricket gear. He basically travelled with his bat and his boots.
It was a very different experience, even before the horrors of the attack on the Sri Lankan team minibus sent the Pakistan team into enforced exile. On other tours, players splinter, visiting friends or restaurants. Here, we were all in it together, watching a lot of TV in team rooms. Culturally, we missed out, but to be honest visiting tourist sites loses its allure when you’ve had a four-hour practice session in 35-degree heat.
I didn’t play on the three-Test tour, even when Andrew Strauss went home before the final match to attend the birth of his son Sam, but I was integrated immediately into the group. I might have been the rookie, in my first team meeting, but they wanted my insight into my Essex teammate Danish Kaneria, the right-arm leg-spinner who would eventually be banned for life for spot fixing.
Sport reflects the brittleness and uncertainty of life. I’ve never asked Marcus Trescothick about the illness which resulted in his departure from the 2006 tour of India and my unlikely Test debut. Our conversations tend to centre on the future, in the form of his coaching ambitions, rather than the past. I suppose it reflects the unspoken reality that one man’s misfortune is another’s opportunity.
When he returned home, citing a virus as a diversion from the terrors of what would eventually be diagnosed as clinical depression, I was on an England Lions tour of the West Indies. I’d scored 6 in the first innings of the initial unofficial Test at the Recreation Ground in Antigua when I received a tap on the shoulder from Peter Moores, our coach.
‘Go and pack your bags. You and Jimmy are being called up to go and play in India.’
I’d never heard of Nagpur, our destination, and frankly dreaded the journey because Jimmy had abused me a fair old bit the previous September, when I got the treatment from the entire Lancashire team in a County Championship match at Chelmsford. I’d scored a double hundred against the Australians the previous week, and they informed me I was a posh boy who was ‘strutting around’.
A bit harsh, and not entirely fair, but Jimmy gave me a particularly pungent send-off when he had me caught by Andrew Symonds for 19 in the second innings, after I’d made 64 first up. The memory was with me as we commandeered the team bus and headed to the beach, since we had time to kill before the evening flight.
We’d barely spoken on the tour and lay there, half pretending we were asleep. I thought I’d better break the ice, since we were about to fly halfway around the world and would spend the first seven hours of a two-day journey cooped up together in cattle class, on the way to London. It was a strange, short, exchange.
‘You know that time you called me a c**t. Did you mean it?’
‘Nah. I call everyone a c**t.’
‘Oh, all right, then.’
With that we started chatting away, as you tend to do. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. The extent of the chance became clear in a Heathrow hotel during a twelve-hour stopover. I was flicking through Ceefax (ask your dad, kids,) got to page 340, the cricket page, and saw the headline ‘Trescothick Flies Home’.
Up until that point, I couldn’t really see a way in to a top six of Tres, Vaughan, Bell, Collingwood, Strauss and KP. I turned to Alice, who had popped over from uni, and said ‘Oh, God. There’s an outside chance of me playing here.’ A twelve-hour stopover in Mumbai and two training sessions later, I was in.
Freddie Flintoff became captain when Vaughan finally lost the battle of his wounded knee. In what felt like a dream sequence, he saw me bat and announced: ‘He’s playing.’ This wasn’t great news for Matt Prior, who, as reserve wicketkeeper, was the only other realistic option for a place. Logic dictated that my status, as a specialist opener, gave me priority.
Wow. Here was Freddie, the big hitter, the hero who scared Australia, telling everyone I was his man. We would play together for three years before retirement from international cricket in 2010, following a year-long rehabilitation from knee surgery, broadened his horizons. Not for the last time, it felt as though I was turning the pages of a comic book, wondering what plot twist would next ambush the superhero. Life was not dull.
In this case the superhero clashed, rather predictably, with KP. It is rare for either of two alpha males to defer to the other, but if Freddie liked you, he stood by your side. He was a force of nature, a talismanic figure who loved laughing at his own jokes and drove himself to be a magnificent bowler by developing that elusive skill of hitting the back of a length quickly.
I look at him now, applying that natural determination to a hugely successful secondary career, and wonder whether he could have got more out of himself as a cricketer. He’s a gym bunny, hasn’t had a drink for something like four years, and is ripped to shreds, physically. He’s ten kilos lighter than when he was a player.
That additional mass is the equivalent, for a bowler, of having forty kilos going through your knee and ankle. How much wear and tear would he have avoided had he maintained a slightly lower fighting weight? We’ll never know, and, given his mocking self-promotion as ‘a fat lad’, we probably shouldn’t ask. His legend is justifiably secure.
To give him his due, KP worked on his batting with greater intensity. He lacked Freddie’s common touch, though the stereotype of the Northern lad who loves a pint was never entirely accurate. Freddie
knew the power of his personality and remains a brilliant self-promoter. Good luck to the guy. He certainly helped me at a pivotal moment in my career.
I was one of three debutants in Nagpur, alongside Ian Blackwell and Monty Panesar. In one sense I had little to lose, because I was just off the plane. In another, as I walked out alongside Straussy, I knew I was about to confront the ultimate test of an English opening batsman, dealing with spin almost from the get-go.
The rhythm of batting in India is so different. Facing world-class spinners with men around the bat, especially once the ball loses its hardness, requires patience and focus. The subcontinent rarely offers the respite of an occasional nick through third man to get going, as is the case when you open in more accustomed circumstances, against pace bowling.
There’s little certainty about conditions, but the process is regimented, which suited my character. Goochy captured the challenge perfectly, telling me ‘you have the opportunity to set the game up’. I caught myself looking down at the three lions on my shirt in wonder a few times (my promotion was too quick for it to have been inscribed with my England number, 630), but did my job, being fourth out for 60, with the score on 136.
The fourth day began with the Indians threatening to field in casual clothes unless they were paid a 130-rupee laundry allowance. It ended with me unbeaten on 104, suitably grateful that Harbhajan Singh dropped a spooned return catch when I was on 70. For good measure I had received my first marriage proposal, scrawled on a piece of cardboard.
Alice was studying in Reading. I checked.
I scored only 17 and 2 in the second Test, which we lost, and missed the third in Mumbai, which we won, through illness. I was off and running. Though I tend to think the role is over-romanticized, because we will bat with the lower order if we do our job properly, Straussy was the first of my fifteen opening partners in Test cricket.
Since my sport is a statistical smorgasbord, someone has inevitably calculated that Sunil Gavaskar holds the record with nineteen. In human terms, the list forms an interesting case study of the collateral damage inflicted by the international game. It features different characters with contrasting strengths and weaknesses, united by the responsibility of providing firm foundations.
The Autobiography Page 6