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NightwatchmanTHE WISDEN QUARTERLY SAMPLER

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NightwatchmanTHE WISDEN CRICKET QUARTERLY

Cricket’s past has been enriched by great writing and Wisden is making sure its future will be too. The 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 ’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

Scott Oliver deconstructs

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 about , And batting. And batting

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

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

Marcus Trescothick doesn’t look like a related illness”, a full squad of cricketers man with depression. He looks like a man have followed suit. For a while it seemed with very sore ankles. He’s wearing flip- to be contagious within the England set- flops and carrying an icebox. “For the up as , , feet,” he grumbles, signing autographs , Steven Davies, Tim behind the pavilion at Lord’s. Trescothick’s Ambrose and Mike Yardy all opened up. feet do indeed look shot, but he remains County cricketers are not immune: Luke upbeat. have taken 12 in Sutton, Darren Cousins… the day, which helps. He’s had a decent, if unspectacular match and can’t stop picking Is it cricket? Is there something about the up catches. “We haven’t had many days game, the combination of luck, bloody- like this,” he confesses as we amble in the mindedness, unpredictability and caprice autumn sunshine towards the Harris Garden. that can drive a man or a woman over the edge? Or is it the other way around: that No, Trescothick doesn’t look like a man with the kind of people who make it to the top depression at all. But then neither do I. Few of this game are the kind of intense, driven people do. You can’t tell. It’s not like cataracts individuals whose very self-obsession or chicken pox. It’s the hidden disease of makes them more vulnerable to mental the day – in our schools, workplaces, our illness? In short, are cricketers mad? boardrooms and our corridors of power, in our tower blocks and suburbs and rural I’ve wanted to speak to Tres ever since my retreats. And on our cricket pitches? own thing four years ago. We have, it seems, much in common. We were both cut down Since Tres bailed from an Indian tour in our prime; he while touring for England, early in 2006 citing a mysterious “stress- I while working on a British newspaper THE NIGHTWATCHMAN

newsdesk. We suffered horrendous insomnia, clinical depression don’t really have much crises of mood, anxiety, ever-circling space for regret. Mostly they’re just happy rumination and even suicidal thoughts. Yet to be alive and in a good place. That’s we have more or less come through, still with usually enough. good jobs, sweet children, patient wives. We have both written books about depression. Tres says: “I’d love to have carried on. I had We have both scored double hundreds for great fun while I did it. The adulation is England too – Tres at in 2003, me amazing. When you do well it’s amazing, repeatedly in my daydreams. He’s one of my when you do bad it’s worse. I loved playing heroes. I am a stranger to him. for England. But then after a while I hated touring, being away from home. I didn’t He is, he confesses, something of an like being on my own. Everything I enjoyed agony aunt for other players flirting in the past I hated. Having my first child with the same black dog. “I’ve spoken to made it harder, leaving that behind. It people along the way,” he says. “Some became too great a thing to leave behind.” people asking a few questions, someone might call on behalf of someone else to For some people, if you remove the find out about it. Some people want to trigger the illness abates. Not so for Tres. talk, say ‘I’ve struggled with this or that.’ He hasn’t toured since 2007. But he still I just tend to listen. I can’t advise on a suffers. “It’s a mixture. It’s up and down clinical level. Some of it is similar to my all the time. You’re always wary of it. You own story.” have good days, you have bad days,” he says. Experience makes it easier to know That story took a dramatic plot twist in what the triggers are and what to avoid. February 2006. By his own admission, For him, it’s bad news, TV news, rotten Trescothick was falling out of love with things happening to friends, loved ones. touring, but this was something else: a “I find it hard watching the news because vortex of anxiety, crippling panic attacks it’s all bad. More bad problems – I hate in a hotel room in a random Indian city, a bad things involving kids. Everything has sense not just that he wouldn’t get through to remain positive because the minute the tour, but that he wouldn’t get through I hear something bad about a friend or the night. It was the beginning of the end something on the news, then it makes me of his international career. “Suddenly, feel bad and I spiral.” overnight, it was like I don’t want to do this [tour] anymore,” he recalls. “Whether Like me, when the fog descends, Tres knows that’s just the illness itself that caused those what to do. “I have to keep busy,” he says. feelings, I don’t know. As much as I loved “I can’t just pull the covers over my head. I playing for England, I’d rather be at home have to get up, get doing things, clean the with my family.” He hit one more hundred car 10 times, hoover the whole house.” I for England that summer before a relapse in picture Tres in pads and helmet, with a Gunn Australia, and a frightening panic attack at and Moore hoover in his hand, not moving Heathrow before heading off on a Somerset his feet too much as he utterly dominates tour, made the decision for him. No more the attack on the flat track that is his living touring. He never played for England again. room floor. He still takes anti-depressants. So do I. “I don’t see a reason to stop. I’d I ask whether he had any regrets, while rather give myself the best opportunity to secretly knowing the answer. People with just be happy and be normal.”

THENIGHTWATCHMAN.NET 5 MARK RICE-OXLEY

Ah, yes, normal. Tres comes across as We should of course have thought about a pretty normal guy. But then it is quite the obverse. It’s far more instructive. How possible to be both normal and to suffer many consecutive ducks would it take for from depression. This is a condition an England player to lose his place? Bear that affects around five per cent of the in mind that was dropped world’s population, according to the definitively after scores of 90, 46, 41, 44, World Health Organisation. You don’t get 1*, 43, 52, 44, 34, 2, 66, 13. How many filthy more normal than being the same as 350 spells does it take for a county million people. trundler to lose his livelihood? Scott Boswell knows the answer: one. But, I wonder, is cricket disproportionately affected? A survey earlier this year Isn’t this pressure intolerable? Doesn’t conducted by the Professional Cricketers’ it just create the kind of stress that Association Benevolent Fund asked 500 depression feeds off? I don’t know about cricketers present and past a range of you, but if I make a mistake in my job, I questions about mental and physical health. can sneak onto the internet when no one’s Intriguingly it found five per cent of those looking and change it. You can’t rewrite surveyed had sought help for mental health a first-ball nick to the keeper any other problems. So the sport is nothing special. way than Rice-Oxley: c Dujon b Holding 0 (that didn’t actually happen – I made it up. “It’s a problem of stress,” says Tres. But I quite like the look of it). “I went from “Everyone has their own pressure and making a double-hundred for England to anxiety that they live their life by. Just being in the second XI four because I play cricket doesn’t mean to say months later,” says Graeme Fowler (what I’m more vulnerable. is it about left-handed England openers?) “There were massive ups and downs.” “It’s no different from any other walk of life.” All sports have their ups and downs of course, and cricket is not alone in And yet... and yet... producing sportsmen with depression. Ian Thorpe, Stan Collymore, Frank Bruno, • • • John Kirwan, Ronnie O’Sullivan and Neil One of my oldest cricketing friends, Lennon have all spoken openly about their Dave, and I used to speculate: how many own battles. consecutive centuries would we have to score to force our way into the England But, like me, Fowler finds himself wondering team? As we were playing rather mediocre “whether cricket attracts a certain type of at the time, the answer was person, or cricket makes you a certain type of quite a few: say 12-15 tons on the bounce person.” It’s often said that cricket is a game to force our way to the fringes of the played in the head. But how much of the county scene, another six or so to get a fitness regimes, the net practice, the tactical match for the first team. And then perhaps and strategic preparations are concerned 10 or 12 more three-figure scores to get with what a player is thinking about? the selectors’ attention? As we had fewer than one between us in our entire “We do loads of physical training, but how careers at that point, the exercise, you much of it concerns the brain?” asks Fowler. understand, was academic. “Very little.” And this from a man who is

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not just a fellow sufferer of depression but filled their boots. So that next time you go a coach of young talent. “Even though out there, that notion of failure is never too we know it’s all about temperament, how far away from the back of your mind… you deal with pressure, we do very little [training] about it.” Or what about bowling? You must hurl a ball, with a straight arm please, and from There are plenty of theories – and scientific a rather exact position, 22 yards, making disagreements – as to the cause of it land in the same place every time, with depression, many of them too medical to sufficient guile, pace, or other sleight of mention here. After four years of thinking hand to avoid the destructive impulses of about the subject, I have rationalised it the batsman (I’ll let you in on a secret here: thus: it’s a condition that feeds on stress. I only broke my nose once playing cricket Once upon a time we were creatures that and it was while bowling, not batting). You responded to existential threats presented must do this again and again and again. by a predator with sudden bursts of Sometimes when you do it well, you will adrenaline, the flight-or-fight reflex. get little reward. And sometimes, when Nowadays, the stressors have changed you do it badly, you will get lucky. Just not beyond all recognition – there are no often enough to make a career out of it. sabre-toothed tigers anymore – but the responses haven’t. We have 21st century Jason Ratcliffe, the assistant chief executive sensibilities running on Neanderthal of the Professional Cricketers’ Association, software. The adrenaline pumps regularly admits there is something of the perverse and often, whether we’re in mortal danger in the game. “We all come into the game as or just coming out to bat at No.9 for Malden enthusiastic excited young people,” says Wanderers 3rd XI. It’s an overwrought Ratcliffe, who experienced a brief brush system. The psychiatrist Tim Cantopher with depression after he retired. “But once told me it was like putting 18 volts cricket is by its nature – the , the through a 13-amp system. It will eventually conditions, the different people you play blow. “If you try to do the undoable, you’re against – often out of your control. going to get this,” Cantopher says. “Stress doesn’t make you ill. You do – by trying to “The core of the game is stoic batting: do the undoable.” watch your off stump, leave the ball. It’s the same with bowling: line and length, Isn’t batting “trying to do the undoable”? line and length. When you stand back and You stand 22 feet away from a bowler, think about what you’re doing day in day armed with a four-inch- piece of out, sometimes it’s bloody monotonous!” wood and try to hit a five-ounce piece of cork and leather travelling at 90 miles Iain O’Brien agrees. The New Zealander per hour. Again and again. No two balls who played 22 Tests between 2004 and are the same. Your livelihood rests on the 2009 has since opened up about the outcome. And here’s the perverse bit: to bouts of depression that have followed be successful, most of the time you won’t him on and off the pitch. He says cricket want to hit the ball at all. Sometimes you dressing-rooms are full of players with odd might have to wait hours, days even, to mental tics. “I’ve played with guys with all bat. And then you might just get the one forms of mental illness,” he says, spotting terrifying of the match that leaves OCD tendencies in some and selfishness you with nought while everyone else has bordering on Asperger’s in others.

THENIGHTWATCHMAN.NET 7 MARK RICE-OXLEY

But perhaps most illuminating of all is that bowler, says in one of several videos that he says many players will tend to dwell not the PCA has prepared to help players on successes but on failure. It is this kind of negotiate the psychological perils and negative, unhelpful thinking that can fuel pitfalls of a professional career. “I’d really depressive episodes. “I had a good chat hit rock bottom. I tried to take my own life with [Australian Test player] Ed Cowan,” in March 2011.” O’Brien says. “He phrased it well and said we spend more time thinking about Sadly, cricketing suicides are not rare, as our next inevitable failure than our next David Frith’s book Silence of the Heart success. That’s the psyche of cricketers.” makes plain. Graeme Fowler told me he didn’t want to kill himself, “but I didn’t want He agrees with Fowler – that cricket is a to live either”. He had run down the clock mental game and not enough is done to on his career at Durham, founded the prepare players for that. “It takes strong university’s centre of cricketing excellence, people to get through this,” says O’Brien, and was enjoying life with a young family. who has written a children’s book with Bit by bit, the September “shiver” that he references to both cricket and depression, recalled from his playing days enveloped Pirates Don’t Play Cricket. “It’s a mental him. “It wasn’t until eight years after I game and it costs you mental energy and retired that I was diagnosed with severe it’s that mental energy that I don’t think clinical depression. I was at the bottom of we train enough. We end up in a hole and the well, couldn’t go out, couldn’t talk to we’re so head-tired.” anyone,” he recalls.

• • • He was off work for three months, and And then you retire. What’s it like when endured several false starts in trying to you’re out for the last time, back in the get back to his coaching role at Durham dressing-room, finally, definitively, flush University. Depression is like that – it’s up against the beginning of the rest of never just suddenly over. It fights you all your life? Not every player can go out like the way. “I was on heavy medication. I Muttiah Muralitharan, taking his 800th basically ended up looking at life through wicket with his final ball in , or a plate glass window. I felt numb and that like , hitting the winning was better than feeling pain.” runs to go to a final Test century at Lord’s. The PCA knows there are ex-cricketers Eventually he weaned himself off the pills who really struggle with life beyond the and now manages his depression with a boundary. Ratcliffe says one in three crude points system – still interested in his players will struggle with the post-career scores, you see. Ten is an average, bearable transition; the PCA survey found that day. Below ten, and he needs to watch it. of those recently retired, a significant Up in the teens and it’s life as normal. His minority – 24 per cent – said they were less daughters help. “They ask ‘what number than satisfied or disappointed with their are you today.’ And I tell them. And they post-playing career. know whether to leave me alone or not.”

“I really hadn’t found anything to Fowler thinks the sudden rash of mental replace cricket as a love, as a passion, health cases may be due to the fact that as a job,” Darren Cousins, the former the modern player can afford to be more Northamptonshire, Surrey and open. “In my day, if you’d said you’d got

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depression they’d have thought you were He’s also been something of a poster boy a nutcase and no good for cricket. People for mental health issues. I ask if that could kept quiet. It was like homosexuals in the figure in his future. After all, his book drew 1960s who wouldn’t say anything because huge plaudits, not just for the content they’d be sneered at.” but for the courage of “coming out” and making mental illness seem a little more Sports psychology has come a long acceptable in the game of cricket. way since then. “The acceptance has progressed. They can see people [with “I’m certainly open to the idea,” says depression] can still function and play.” Tres, as the sun goes down on another season. Autumn in more senses • • • than one. “I like getting involved and People like Trescothick. Retirement is just making a difference. I pick and choose around the corner for him now. Much the things that will have the biggest depends on the feet. And his form, which impact. I get asked to do a million and wasn’t exactly blistering this season. In one things to help out with mental an unguarded moment, just as I think health. I can’t do it all. I’d seriously we are becoming chummy, I blurt out a consider doing something in the future stupid question: isn’t it odd, I wonder, to with it. I’ve lived it, I understand it, I be playing while the rest of us work for a still deal with it and it’s become an living. He stiffens a little. “The day after I left increasing problem that people have school, I played cricket. I’m lucky. I adore to deal with.” what I do. But is it odd? I don’t know.” We head off out of the Grace Gates; me This makes me wonder how he will towards the tube, him to the hotel. We negotiate the transition to life after discuss my own son’s cricketing summer cricket. The game has been his life, and – good eye for a ball, a few reasonable like a lot of players he sometimes gives scores – but no foot movement at all. “I’m the impression of being happier on the probably not the right person to ask,” he field than off it. “I want to stay within the says with a small smile. “You don’t have game,” he says. “I’d love to be involved to move your feet. I’ve batted like that all with Somerset. I’ve been there since I was my life.” 16. If I can remain working at the club and be involved with the club, I’d bite your I look at the icebox, the flip-flops and the hand off. But it’s wherever I’m going to trademark ponderous gait. Yes, I think, get paid. I’ve got to pay the bills.” Tres is still good for a few more seasons.

• • •

THENIGHTWATCHMAN.NET 9 SAMPLER

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 .

. • • •

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.

THENIGHTWATCHMAN.NET 11 SAMPLER

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 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 , 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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