4WINTER 2013

THE WISDEN CRICKET QUARTERLYNightwatchmanTHE

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Cricket’s past has been enriched by great writing and Wisden is making sure its future will be too. The Nightwatchman is a quarterly collection of essays and long-form articles and is available in print and e-book formats.

Co-edited by Osman Samiuddin and Tanya Aldred, with Matt Thacker as managing editor, The Nightwatchman features an array of authors from around the world, writing beautifully and at length about the game and its myriad offshoots. Contributors are given free rein over subject matter and length, escaping the pressures of next-day deadlines and the despair of cramming heart and soul into a few paragraphs.

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Issue 4, out in early December, will feature the following:

Alex Massie delves into Douglas Jardine’s Caledonian heritage

Dileep Premachandran tries to come to terms with Sachin’s departure

Marcus Berkmann plays for a side that is almost 600 years old

Liam Herringshaw digs up the dirt on fast bowlers

Olly Ricketts on the star of an Australian tour almost 150 years ago

Vaneisa Baksh on the role of radio in West Indian cricket

Raf Nicholson & Isa Guha compare and contrast Down Under successes

Tom Jeffreys on the architecture of cricket grounds

Richard Hobson says let’s hear it for the ODI

David Tossell was at a Test that wasn’t

Mark Rice-Oxley talks depression with fellow sufferer Marcus Trescothick

Scott Oliver deconstructs Graham Onions

David Mutton visits a corner of the US that is forever cricket

Nicholas Hogg opens his autograph book and gets all nostalgic

Peter Della Penna on an all-American boy’s Damascene conversion

Jon Hotten talks to Mark Ramprakash about batting, And batting. And batting

On the following pages you’ll find an article by Mark Rice-Oxley

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LIFTING THE LID ON DEPRESSION

Marcus Trescothick doesn’t look like a man with depression. He looks like a man with very sore ankles. He’s wearing flip-flops and carrying an icebox. “For the feet,” he grumbles, signing autographs behind the pavilion at Lord’s. Trescothick’s feet do indeed look shot, but he remains upbeat. Somerset have taken 12 wickets in the day, which helps. He’s had a decent, if unspectacular match and can’t stop picking up slip catches. “We haven’t had many days like this,” he confesses as we amble in the autumn sunshine towards the Harris Garden.

No, Trescothick doesn’t look like a man with depression at all. But then neither do I. Few people do. You can’t tell. It’s not like cataracts or chicken pox. It’s the hidden disease of the day – in our schools, workplaces, our boardrooms and our corridors of power, in our tower blocks and suburbs and rural retreats. And on our cricket pitches?

Since Tres bailed from an Indian tour early in 2006 citing a mysterious “stress-

related illness”, a full squad of cricketers have followed suit. For a while it seemed to be contagious within the England set-up as Steve Harmison, Matthew Hoggard, Andrew Flintoff, Steven Davies, Tim Ambrose and Mike Yardy all opened up. County cricketers are not immune: Luke Sutton, Darren Cousins…

Is it cricket? Is there something about the game, the combination of luck, bloody-mindedness, unpredictability and caprice that can drive a man or a woman over the edge? Or is it the other way around: that the kind of people who make it to the top of this game are the kind of intense, driven individuals whose very self-obsession makes them more vulnerable to mental illness? In short, are cricketers mad?

I’ve wanted to speak to Tres ever since my own thing four years ago. We have, it seems, much in common. We were both cut down in our prime; he while touring for England, I while working on a British newspaper

Mark Rice-Oxley talks to Marcus Trescothick about his battle with depression and ponders the connection between cricket and mental health issues

MARK RICE-OXLEY

newsdesk. We suffered horrendous insomnia, crises of mood, anxiety, ever-circling rumination and even suicidal thoughts. Yet we have more or less come through, still with good jobs, sweet children, patient wives. We have both written books about depression. We have both scored double hundreds for England too – Tres at The Oval in 2003, me repeatedly in my daydreams. He’s one of my heroes. I am a stranger to him.

He is, he confesses, something of an agony aunt for other players flirting with the same black dog. “I’ve spoken to people along the way,” he says. “Some people asking a few questions, someone might call on behalf of someone else to find out about it. Some people want to talk, say ‘I’ve struggled with this or that.’ I just tend to listen. I can’t advise on a clinical level. Some of it is similar to my own story.”

That story took a dramatic plot twist in February 2006. By his own admission, Trescothick was falling out of love with touring, but this was something else: a vortex of anxiety, crippling panic attacks in a hotel room in a random Indian city, a sense not just that he wouldn’t get through the tour, but that he wouldn’t get through the night. It was the beginning of the end of his international career. “Suddenly, overnight, it was like I don’t want to do this [tour] anymore,” he recalls. “Whether that’s just the illness itself that caused those feelings, I don’t know. As much as I loved playing for England, I’d rather be at home with my family.” He hit one more hundred for England that summer before a relapse in Australia, and a frightening panic attack at Heathrow before heading off on a Somerset tour, made the decision for him. No more touring. He never played for England again.

I ask whether he had any regrets, while secretly knowing the answer. People with

clinical depression don’t really have much space for regret. Mostly they’re just happy to be alive and in a good place. That’s usually enough.

Tres says: “I’d love to have carried on. I had great fun while I did it. The adulation is amazing. When you do well it’s amazing, when you do bad it’s worse. I loved playing for England. But then after a while I hated touring, being away from home. I didn’t like being on my own. Everything I enjoyed in the past I hated. Having my first child made it harder, leaving that behind. It became too great a thing to leave behind.”

For some people, if you remove the trigger the illness abates. Not so for Tres. He hasn’t toured since 2007. But he still suffers. “It’s a mixture. It’s up and down all the time. You’re always wary of it. You have good days, you have bad days,” he says. Experience makes it easier to know what the triggers are and what to avoid. For him, it’s bad news, TV news, rotten things happening to friends, loved ones. “I find it hard watching the news because it’s all bad. More bad problems – I hate bad things involving kids. Everything has to remain positive because the minute I hear something bad about a friend or something on the news, then it makes me feel bad and I spiral.”

Like me, when the fog descends, Tres knows what to do. “I have to keep busy,” he says. “I can’t just pull the covers over my head. I have to get up, get doing things, clean the car 10 times, hoover the whole house.” I picture Tres in pads and helmet, with a Gunn and Moore hoover in his hand, not moving his feet too much as he utterly dominates the attack on the flat track that is his living room floor. He still takes anti-depressants. So do I. “I don’t see a reason to stop. I’d rather give myself the best opportunity to just be happy and be normal.”

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Ah, yes, normal. Tres comes across as a pretty normal guy. But then it is quite possible to be both normal and to suffer from depression. This is a condition that affects around five per cent of the world’s population, according to the World Health Organisation. You don’t get more normal than being the same as 350 million people.

But, I wonder, is cricket disproportionately affected? A survey earlier this year conducted by the Professional Cricketers’ Association Benevolent Fund asked 500 cricketers present and past a range of questions about mental and physical health. Intriguingly it found five per cent of those surveyed had sought help for mental health problems. So the sport is nothing special.

“It’s a problem of stress,” says Tres. “Everyone has their own pressure and anxiety that they live their life by. Just because I play cricket doesn’t mean to say I’m more vulnerable.

“It’s no different from any other walk of life.”

And yet... and yet...

• • •

One of my oldest cricketing friends, Dave, and I used to speculate: how many consecutive centuries would we have to score to force our way into the England team? As we were playing rather mediocre club cricket at the time, the answer was quite a few: say 12-15 tons on the bounce to force our way to the fringes of the county scene, another six or so to get a match for the first team. And then perhaps 10 or 12 more three-figure scores to get the selectors’ attention? As we had fewer than one century between us in our entire careers at that point, the exercise, you understand, was academic.

We should of course have thought about the obverse. It’s far more instructive. How many consecutive ducks would it take for an England player to lose his place? Bear in mind that Robin Smith was dropped definitively after scores of 90, 46, 41, 44, 1*, 43, 52, 44, 34, 2, 66, 13. How many filthy bowling spells does it take for a county trundler to lose his livelihood? Scott Boswell knows the answer: one.

Isn’t this pressure intolerable? Doesn’t it just create the kind of stress that depression feeds off? I don’t know about you, but if I make a mistake in my job, I can sneak onto the internet when no one’s looking and change it. You can’t rewrite a first-ball nick to the keeper any other way than Rice-Oxley: c Dujon b Holding 0 (that didn’t actually happen – I made it up. But I quite like the look of it). “I went from making a double-hundred for England to being in the Lancashire second XI four months later,” says Graeme Fowler (what is it about left-handed England openers?) “There were massive ups and downs.”

All sports have their ups and downs of course, and cricket is not alone in producing sportsmen with depression. Ian Thorpe, Stan Collymore, Frank Bruno, John Kirwan, Ronnie O’Sullivan and Neil Lennon have all spoken openly about their own battles.

But, like me, Fowler finds himself wondering “whether cricket attracts a certain type of person, or cricket makes you a certain type of person.” It’s often said that cricket is a game played in the head. But how much of the fitness regimes, the net practice, the tactical and strategic preparations are concerned with what a player is thinking about?

“We do loads of physical training, but how much of it concerns the brain?” asks Fowler. “Very little.” And this from a man who is

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not just a fellow sufferer of depression but a coach of young talent. “Even though we know it’s all about temperament, how you deal with pressure, we do very little [training] about it.”

There are plenty of theories – and scientific disagreements – as to the cause of depression, many of them too medical to mention here. After four years of thinking about the subject, I have rationalised it thus: it’s a condition that feeds on stress. Once upon a time we were creatures that responded to existential threats presented by a predator with sudden bursts of adrenaline, the flight-or-fight reflex. Nowadays, the stressors have changed beyond all recognition – there are no sabre-toothed tigers anymore – but the responses haven’t. We have 21st century sensibilities running on Neanderthal software. The adrenaline pumps regularly and often, whether we’re in mortal danger or just coming out to bat at No.9 for Malden Wanderers 3rd XI. It’s an overwrought system. The psychiatrist Tim Cantopher once told me it was like putting 18 volts through a 13-amp system. It will eventually blow. “If you try to do the undoable, you’re going to get this,” Cantopher says. “Stress doesn’t make you ill. You do – by trying to do the undoable.”

Isn’t batting “trying to do the undoable”? You stand 22 feet away from a bowler, armed with a four-inch-wide piece of wood and try to hit a five-ounce piece of cork and leather travelling at 90 miles per hour. Again and again. No two balls are the same. Your livelihood rests on the outcome. And here’s the perverse bit: to be successful, most of the time you won’t want to hit the ball at all. Sometimes you might have to wait hours, days even, to bat. And then you might just get the one terrifying delivery of the match that leaves you with nought while everyone else has

filled their boots. So that next time you go out there, that notion of failure is never too far away from the back of your mind…

Or what about bowling? You must hurl a ball, with a straight arm please, and from a rather exact position, 22 yards, making it land in the same place every time, with sufficient guile, pace, or other sleight of hand to avoid the destructive impulses of the batsman (I’ll let you in on a secret here: I only broke my nose once playing cricket and it was while bowling, not batting). You must do this again and again and again. Sometimes when you do it well, you will get little reward. And sometimes, when you do it badly, you will get lucky. Just not often enough to make a career out of it.

Jason Ratcliffe, the assistant chief executive of the Professional Cricketers’ Association, admits there is something of the perverse in the game. “We all come into the game as enthusiastic excited young people,” says Ratcliffe, who experienced a brief brush with depression after he retired. “But cricket is by its nature – the wicket, the conditions, the different people you play against – often out of your control.

“The core of the game is stoic batting: watch your off stump, leave the ball. It’s the same with bowling: line and length, line and length. When you stand back and think about what you’re doing day in day out, sometimes it’s bloody monotonous!”

Iain O’Brien agrees. The New Zealander who played 22 Tests between 2004 and 2009 has since opened up about the bouts of depression that have followed him on and off the pitch. He says cricket dressing-rooms are full of players with odd mental tics. “I’ve played with guys with all forms of mental illness,” he says, spotting OCD tendencies in some and selfishness bordering on Asperger’s in others.

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But perhaps most illuminating of all is that he says many players will tend to dwell not on successes but on failure. It is this kind of negative, unhelpful thinking that can fuel depressive episodes. “I had a good chat with [Australian Test player] Ed Cowan,” O’Brien says. “He phrased it well and said we spend more time thinking about our next inevitable failure than our next success. That’s the psyche of cricketers.”

He agrees with Fowler – that cricket is a mental game and not enough is done to prepare players for that. “It takes strong people to get through this,” says O’Brien, who has written a children’s book with references to both cricket and depression, Pirates Don’t Play Cricket. “It’s a mental game and it costs you mental energy and it’s that mental energy that I don’t think we train enough. We end up in a hole and we’re so head-tired.”

• • •

And then you retire. What’s it like when you’re out for the last time, back in the dressing-room, finally, definitively, flush up against the beginning of the rest of your life? Not every player can go out like Muttiah Muralitharan, taking his 800th wicket with his final ball in Test cricket, or like Nasser Hussain, hitting the winning runs to go to a final Test century at Lord’s. The PCA knows there are ex-cricketers who really struggle with life beyond the boundary. Ratcliffe says one in three players will struggle with the post-career transition; the PCA survey found that of those recently retired, a significant minority – 24 per cent – said they were less than satisfied or disappointed with their post-playing career.

“I really hadn’t found anything to replace cricket as a love, as a passion, as a job,” Darren Cousins, the former Northamptonshire, Surrey and Essex

bowler, says in one of several videos that the PCA has prepared to help players negotiate the psychological perils and pitfalls of a professional career. “I’d really hit rock bottom. I tried to take my own life in March 2011.”

Sadly, cricketing suicides are not rare, as David Frith’s book Silence of the Heart makes plain. Graeme Fowler told me he didn’t want to kill himself, “but I didn’t want to live either”. He had run down the clock on his career at Durham, founded the university’s centre of cricketing excellence, and was enjoying life with a young family. Bit by bit, the September “shiver” that he recalled from his playing days enveloped him. “It wasn’t until eight years after I retired that I was diagnosed with severe clinical depression. I was at the bottom of the well, couldn’t go out, couldn’t talk to anyone,” he recalls.

He was off work for three months, and endured several false starts in trying to get back to his coaching role at Durham University. Depression is like that – it’s never just suddenly over. It fights you all the way. “I was on heavy medication. I basically ended up looking at life through a plate glass window. I felt numb and that was better than feeling pain.”

Eventually he weaned himself off the pills and now manages his depression with a crude points system – still interested in his scores, you see. Ten is an average, bearable day. Below ten, and he needs to watch it. Up in the teens and it’s life as normal. His daughters help. “They ask ‘what number are you today.’ And I tell them. And they know whether to leave me alone or not.”

Fowler thinks the sudden rash of mental health cases may be due to the fact that the modern player can afford to be more open. “In my day, if you’d said you’d got

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depression they’d have thought you were a nutcase and no good for cricket. People kept quiet. It was like homosexuals in the 1960s who wouldn’t say anything because they’d be sneered at.”

Sports psychology has come a long way since then. “The acceptance has progressed. They can see people [with depression] can still function and play.”

• • •

People like Trescothick. Retirement is just around the corner for him now. Much depends on the feet. And his form, which wasn’t exactly blistering this season. In an unguarded moment, just as I think we are becoming chummy, I blurt out a stupid question: isn’t it odd, I wonder, to be playing while the rest of us work for a living. He stiffens a little. “The day after I left school, I played cricket. I’m lucky. I adore what I do. But is it odd? I don’t know.”

This makes me wonder how he will negotiate the transition to life after cricket. The game has been his life, and like a lot of players he sometimes gives the impression of being happier on the field than off it. “I want to stay within the game,” he says. “I’d love to be involved with Somerset. I’ve been there since I was 16. If I can remain working at the club and be involved with the club, I’d bite your hand off. But it’s wherever I’m going to get paid. I’ve got to pay the bills.”

He’s also been something of a poster boy for mental health issues. I ask if that could figure in his future. After all, his book drew huge plaudits, not just for the content but for the courage of “coming out” and making mental illness seem a little more acceptable in the game of cricket.

“I’m certainly open to the idea,” says Tres, as the sun goes down on another season. Autumn in more senses than one. “I like getting involved and making a difference. I pick and choose the things that will have the biggest impact. I get asked to do a million and one things to help out with mental health. I can’t do it all. I’d seriously consider doing something in the future with it. I’ve lived it, I understand it, I still deal with it and it’s become an increasing problem that people have to deal with.”

We head off out of the Grace Gates; me towards the tube, him to the hotel. We discuss my own son’s cricketing summer – good eye for a ball, a few reasonable scores – but no foot movement at all. “I’m probably not the right person to ask,” he says with a small smile. “You don’t have to move your feet. I’ve batted like that all my life.”

I look at the icebox, the flip-flops and the trademark ponderous gait. Yes, I think, Tres is still good for a few more seasons.

• • •

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ALEX MASSIE

At St Andrews, Jardine found a stand-in father figure in the form of the poet, novelist, folklorist and essayist Andrew Lang. If Malcolm Jardine had bestowed a love of cricket upon his son, Lang deepened the young Douglas’s commitment to the game. Though no great performer himself, Lang had learned the game in his home town of Selkirk in the Scottish Borders and forever remained entranced by it.

“Cricket” he wrote in an introduction to Richard Daft’s Kings of Cricket “is a very humanising game. It appeals to the emotions of local patriotism and pride. It is eminently unselfish; the love of it never leaves us, and binds all the brethren together, whatever their politics and rank may be. There is nothing like it in the sports of mankind”. It must be admitted that his devoted protégé would later test this theory almost to the point of its utter destruction.

• • •

DILEEP PREMACHANDRAN

The last two years were not golden ones – he averaged 32.34 in 23 Tests after that Cape Town epic – but declining form didn’t mean that Tendulkar became a parody of himself as Maradona had. There was no shooting at journalists from a balcony with an air gun, no foul-mouthed rants at fellow players. Just the quiet retreat.

As for his peers, the respect and hero worship remained. When Shakib Al Hasan, who was two when Tendulkar made his debut, wrote a newspaper column after hearing of his retirement, he started it thus: “I should have sought the permission of Sachin before attempting to write on him. He is the God of cricket and how can I be expected to write about the God?”

Not The Greatest, not Cricketer in Excelsis. But God. No pressure.

• • •

LIAM HERRINGSHAW

Our young opening fast bowler is particularly exuberant. No rap on the pads is met with silence, no declined appeal accepted meekly. His expressions of disgust could startle a navvy. They certainly rile many an older opponent. After one fractious encounter this season – a game I had the misfortune of missing – he and the rest of my team were described as ‘Neolithic’ in the opposition’s match report.

This got me thinking. I presumed it was not meant as a compliment, but the Neolithic saw the beginning of farming, the domestication of animals, the development of sophisticated tools and the origin of modern language. If a comparison was supposed to be deeply insulting, it rather missed its mark.

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MARCUS BERKMANN

At 50 we are humble enough to be thankful for merely being alive, as well as just about fit enough to take the field most weekends. Each of us knows that, any day now, the injury might arrive that signals the end of cricket for good. There’s nothing we can do about that, just as there’s nothing we can do about the cancers and heart attacks that will surely strike one or two of us down over the next few years. Having written a lot about midlife crises recently (while being slap-bang in the middle of one) I have realised that they are really only about two things: the loss of youth, and the acceptance of death. Next to these, the inability to bend down and field a ball that is speeding past your ankle for four is trivial. And all this stuff rattles around your brain as you embark on a catastrophic affair, or buy a silly car, or do any of those daft Simon Cowellish things our fathers did years ago and our sons will do in a few years’ time. You can’t solve a midlife crisis; you can only endure it, work through it and, with luck, come out the other side.

• • •

RICHARD HOBSON

If I’d saved a pound for every time someone asked whether being one-day correspondent meant working one day a week then I probably wouldn’t be operating now. Even the Sunday correspondents peddled the line, which really did feel like a case of pots and kettles.

The ribbing stemmed from a hierarchy that goes unchallenged, that Test cricket is the premier form of the game. Everything else should have an asterisk next to the scorecard to remind it is “not the real thing”. Even when something is reluctantly deemed to be good about one-day cricket, it can be placed in a Test match context. History now has the limited-overs series versus Australia in 2005 (which England actually lost) as a softening-up exercise before the Ashes.

. • • •

DAVID TOSSELL

I suppose we’ll have to call them ‘The greatest team that never played Test cricket’. Except that they did. I saw them. I was there, sat as a nine-year-old behind the boundary rope at The Oval as the game’s two greatest left-handers batted for ever. The nuances of a West Indian and a South African in perfect harmony in a series arising from cricket’s stance against apartheid might have been lost on me, but I knew what I watching. This was Test cricket all right. The television and newspapers were calling it that. ‘Fifth Test’ was printed clearly on my scorecard and England players were being awarded Test caps.

Then, a couple of years later, the sport’s rulers decided that, actually, it hadn’t been the real thing after all. In terms of Test cricket, the Rest of the World team that scorched English playing fields in the summer of 1970 had, like Monty Python’s parrot of the same period, ceased to be.

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SCOTT OLIVER

I like to think of Onions sitting in his England tracksuit (it’s a button-down old fantasy; feel free to have him in stockings and suspenders if you must) in the car on the way up the M1 to Nottingham from London on Thursday 16 August, 2012, reading Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology in unwitting preparation for his career-best evisceration of the Nottinghamshire batting. A trifle far-fetched perhaps, but he would certainly have needed to have been feeling philosophical about things having been England’s odd man out for the third game in a row, left out of the XI for the crucial Test against South Africa at Lord’s in which, post-‘textgate’, a KP-less home side would end up with the preposterous ICC Mace prised from their grasp like a bat from a truculent seven-year-old’s hands. Even his omission was overshadowed, marginalised; an omission of an omission.

• • •

NICHOLAS HOGG

Can that hurried scrawl in a teenage autograph-hunter’s book reveal the private workings of a professional cricketer?

In 1895 professor of psychophysiology Wilhelm Preyer decreed that “handwriting features which tend to appear together express a certain psychological trait.” Curiously, the following assertion from the non-cricketing Wilhelm could also refer to a batsman or a bowler: “The hand is only an instrument between the brain and the pen.”

Or perhaps the ball, or the bat. Before we ridicule the graphologists we should acknowledge the cricketologist in all of us, the armchair pundit who assassinates character by watching how a batsman cover drives or late cuts, whether he ducks the rearing bouncer or hooks it out of the ground – we all judge the man by the shots he plays or the deliveries he sends down.

• • •

JON HOTTEN

I’d begun by wanting to find out what drove him once his international career was over, what made him carry on for all of those quiet afternoons at the Oval, or Guildford, on deserted grounds, in English light, when the world had already made up its mind about him. I’d seen what he had done as something redemptive, but also as something vengeful and angry. It was easy to imagine him as the brooding Heathcliff of the county championship, an outsider denied his destiny, and perhaps there was an element of all of those things in what happened. But most of all, it was apparent that great second act of his life was actually inspired by love, the love of what he did and what he had.

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The fourth edition of The Nightwatchman will be published at the beginning of December 2013 on a limited print run. So subscribe or order now to ensure that you get your copy.

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