While England’s best T20 specialists, and Jade Dernbach, toil in Bangladesh, we’ll look ahead to the summer when we might actually win a game. As Jonathan Trott is the only decent number 3 we’ve had in recent years, his recovery is vital to the test team. That’s why Nick Allbury, our new guest writer, focuses on his recovery here. Thanks for your thoughts, Nick.
It’s the 25th November 2013. Just hours after England’s first Test defeat in Brisbane, Jonathan Trott is reclining in his seat at thirty five thousand feet with only his thoughts for company and twenty four hours of empty sky in front of him.
He has just walked away from The Ashes, the single biggest event in cricket, the reward for a lifetime’s endeavour. He may try to lose himself in a film or a book, but his mind, the reason he is on this plane, won’t cooperate. He cannot help but reflect on how he has reached this precipice.
He looks out of the window and observes the curvature of the planet. He has been on it for thirty two years, for most of them completely immersed in cricket. From his debut for Cape Town’s Rondebosch Boys’ High School to that unforgettable century at The Oval in 2009, every side he has represented, every challenge he has faced has been another staging post on a relentless journey to be the best he can possibly be.
And yet, having made it this far, he has walked away. The ECB described it as a stress-related illness. Trott will later say it was burnout. It doesn’t matter to me. They are just words. Terminology. I don’t know what it all means. I don’t play professional sport. I sit in front of a computer all day in a kind of semi-stupor. The nearest I get to burnout is when I spill my tea.
This is why I can’t bring myself to pass judgment. All I see is a bloke who, in making such an epic decision, must have gone through a personal hell.
It hasn’t stopped others from speculating or making crass assumptions. Michael Vaughan says he feels “conned” at Trott’s burnout admission, as if all he needed was a couple of quiet nights in with the latest Lee Child. He isn’t alone. We live in the Internet age, a world of shadows where for every ten voices of support there is another laced with such bitterness and bile that you would think Trott had entered their home and eaten their children rather than simply left a cricket tour. In the false reality of social media we are all sages and psychologists and there is no accountability.
Trott is an intelligent guy. He will have known all of this when he made his decision, that the words selfish and coward and quitter would be tossed around life confetti. He would have known all this and yet he still did it. How bad must he have felt?
He would have had to explain to his teammates, his friends and his own wife and three year old daughter just why he was coming home early. This in itself must have torn him to pieces. We aren’t talking about a take-it-or-leave-it kind of guy here. This is a man for whom competitiveness and the relentless desire to succeed are written into his DNA. He is a thinker, by all accounts, an intense character who takes his failures to bed, allowing them to infiltrate his quiet moments. For him to come to this decision and go through with it smacks not just of bravery but of absolute conviction that he was doing the right thing. The coward’s way would have been to lie low and muddle through the rest of the series. He may have been dropped anyway, the decision taken from his hands.
But he didn’t.
As the clouds drift inexorably by, Trott’s thoughts turn to the future. Cricket is all he knows. He is acutely aware that the voices of cynicism and dissent will not be confined to typed streams of 140 characters or fewer. They will exist amongst paying supporters, the media and even the rank and file of his sport.
This May, when he descends the Edgbaston steps, he will no doubt receive warm and generous applause from the huddled pensioners, though there may be one or two catcalls too. The moment of truth will come if he makes his international return. He will have to walk into that dressing room and face the men he supposedly deserted. Most will be supportive, but you can be sure there will be one or two Vaughanites, embittered by the idea of betrayal, greeting Trott’s arrival with a turn the shoulder.
He will emerge to face his public – there will be more than a few catcalls this time – and then the opposition, perhaps torn between sympathy and the urge to let slip the odd comment designed to unsettle. He may even face Johnson again, his executioner. Imagine that.
The saddest part is that whatever Trott goes on to achieve in the rest of his career, his decision to leave The Ashes will travel with him, a ready-made noose around his neck. He will always be the coward, the deserter, the flat-track bully who ran away when the going got tough. As the plane soars towards England and home, you can guarantee that every one of these thoughts has taken turns to attack his distressed mind, like a pack animal downing its prey.
I just hope that by returning so soon, Trott knows what he is doing. Cricket and batsmanship in particular, is a cruel psychological mistress. Like anyone who reaches the very top, Trott has overcome as many mental as physical hurdles to get there. He now faces his greatest challenge yet.
@nickallbury
Well said Sir. Whilst the ECB (shock horror) may have mismanaged both Trott and the media, it is hard to critics a man who need to manage his own well being. If Trott had cancer he’d had sympathy from all corner, but mental illness (or whatever label you wish to use) is still considered a weakness.
I for one, will welcome him back into the fold both as a cricketer and as someone who has overcome. There are many cricketers, other sportsmen and women and normal people who haven’t.
great post. I reckon Trott is welcome back to cricket and a classy player. You have a great blog. Would you mind checking out my blog: mycricketnet.com. I am only 11 but have been blogging since the age of 9. DO you think you could maybe even give it a share?
No problem mate. You write really well. Would never guess you were only 11…