Trott a cautionary tale of great expectations

In the days when Jonathan Trott was a dominant batting force and England – not coincidentally – were the world’s best team, their players and supporters took no small measure of reassurance from the arrival of the doughty South African-born batsman at the crease.

For amid the relentless gouging of the pitch with his shoe spikes and the subsequent stroll around his immediate precinct that suggested an obsessive need to control his surrounds and routinely infuriated his opposition, Trott earned repute as a calming, reliable presence.

Related: Trott calls time on international career

Never hurried, a composed counterpoint to the human hurricane Kevin Pietersen who batted one berth below him in an England line-up that rose to the top rank of Test cricket in 2011, Trott outwardly portrayed a cricketer at ease with his limitations and his ambitions.

Now lost to the international game after an England career spanning less than six years, the public war that the 34-year-old has waged against crippling anxiety has laid bare the extent of the mental torment that churned beneath that calm, at times cocky on-field persona.

Image Id: ~/media/37262359EE924842845940482CE51099Trott leaves the field in the West Indies // Getty Images

It also sounds a cautionary tale as to the frailties that so often underpin and can so ruthlessly undermine those who pursue a life under the ceaseless scrutiny and the merciless evaluation that are constant companions of the professional athlete.

In many ways, Trott fits the modern template of a cricket-obsessed youngster pushing himself ever harder to maximise his talents and fulfil his sporting dream.

Born in Cape Town to a family of British descent, Trott attended school in the shadows of the city’s fabled Newlands cricket ground and represented South Africa at under-15 and under-19 level before deciding in 2002 (at age 21) that his future lay in England.

Able to sign with county team Warwickshire as a ‘non-overseas’ player, Trott’s organised if risk-minimal technique saw him announce himself in bold print with every rung he climbed on the career ladder.

A double-century on debut for Warwickshire seconds in his first summer on his adopted turf. A century for the firsts in his maiden outing in England’s county championship a year later.

And in 2009 he became just the second England batsman post-War (alongside Graham Thorpe in 1993) to post a hundred in a Test debut against Ashes rival Australia.

Image Id: ~/media/4B52C3DE13C14C87B7D883694A4E04B7Trott scored a century on debut against Australia in 2009 // Getty Images 

But at the same time these sizeable achievements were propelling Trott to the levels of success he had worked so long and hard to reach, it now becomes clearer they were concurrently sowing the seeds of his unfortunate and premature downfall.

By his own admission and with the help of acclaimed UK sports Dr Steve Peters who has worked with English Premier League football clubs and British Olympians, Trott realised that the need to perform to those initial lofty heights he climbed had come to consume him.

“In our first meeting he (Peters) said I wasn’t suffering from depression – he described it as a kind of situational anxiety,” Trott told Britain’s Daily Mail last year.

“My situation was cricket, and (I) don’t have a balanced, rational view of it.

“It’s either success or failure and nothing in between.”

He first felt the effects of anxiety during his maiden senior tour with England, to his former homeland in 2009 though he believes that was more a result of personal and family issues relating to his return to play in South Africa wearing visiting team colours.

It was during the 2013 Ashes series in the UK that it claimed a tighter grip, as Trott felt the pressure to replicate his two previous campaigns against Australia when his century on debut at The Oval was followed by a Test series average of 89 on his first tour down under.

“That was what I had to live up to, which of course was ludicrous,” he said.

Image Id: ~/media/EA2A2158809045809F37EB78EF4D6965Trott celebrates in Australia in 2010-11 // Getty Images

The stress he came to carry and the clouds that started to form in a mind that had previously permitted him a single, unflinching focus – to bat for long periods and score heavily in every match he played – sapped his appetite for the game that had been his life.

His description of the thought processes that accompanied him during a routine nets session as England prepared for a Test match provide an insight into Trott’s addled mindset, with disarming clarity.

‘I’m in the nets and I’m caught behind (as a teammate finds the edge of his bat),” Trott told the Daily Mail.

“I’m thinking ‘f…, what are my team-mates going to think of me?’.

“And then, ‘What if that happens in the game? What are they going to think of me then? What are the opposition going to think of me? What are the spectators going to think? What are the press going to write?’.

“When in fact the bowler is probably thinking he delivered a good ball and half my team-mates probably didn’t even see it.”

At the end of that 2013 series, which England won 3-0, Trott revealed he felt “embarrassed” by his return of 293 runs at 29.3 – a better output than his captain Alastair Cook.

By the time Trott arrived in Australia for their Ashes defence in late 2013, he knew he was struggling but believed the month-long lead-in to the first Test in Brisbane would grant him an opportunity to clear his head and rediscover the rhythm and rationality that had carried him to the elite level.

True to his nature, he had trained obsessively to prepare himself for the trial-by-bouncer he expected from Mitchell Johnson but when he surrendered his wicket to the Australia quick late on the third day of the opening Test – for the second time in the match – the walls closed in.

Image Id: ~/media/4E5CDFA55BED4065BA723448B49FF499

A disappointed Trott in Brisbane in 2013 // Getty Images

The demons cloaked in despairing notions of how his teammates, his critics, his public must be viewing his failures pursued him through every waking minute to the point that he knew he was hindering rather than benefiting England by remaining as part of the touring party.

Trott was in Hong Kong en route to his home in Birmingham when the England and Wales Cricket Board announced he had left the Ashes tour in the wake of the Brisbane Test defeat.

“I wasn’t helping anyone by being there so coming back was the only option because on that kind of tour you can’t carry anybody.” Trott said in an interview with Sky TV in the UK last year.

“It was very difficult for me to operate close to 100 per cent or even 50 per cent of what I was capable of.

“I remember day two or day three (of the first Test) it was a bit of a blur, I was getting headaches and all sorts of things and I wasn’t eating properly towards the end and that’s when the sleep started getting disruptive and, emotionally, that was probably when I was worst and it just boiled over.

“I had nothing left in the tank.”

Initially diagnosed with “burn-out”, Trott attempted a comeback for Warwickshire at the start of the following English summer but abandoned it after two matches as the anxiety returned.

It was then that he began working with Peters, whose help enabled Trott to return to first-class cricket where he scored more than 600 runs in eight matches, and led Warwickshire to the final of the domestic one-day cup competition.

Image Id: ~/media/21CBA732D84B4392A0C14D3E6AFE812B

Trott bats for Warwickshire in 2014 // Getty Images

“People are expecting a magic-wand cure and that’s not really the way it works,” Peters told Britain’s ‘Independent’ newspaper earlier this year.

“You can have periods in sport, sometimes a whole season, when things just aren’t happening and you’re just digging even harder to make it happen again – that’s effectively what Jonathan has done.

“It’s a credit to the man.”

Come season’s end, Trott was named captain of the England Lions second XI that toured South Africa and his double century in the first ‘Test’ of that series led to his selection in the England squad as Alastair Cook’s opening partner for the three-Test series in the West Indies.

But three ducks in six innings – the last of which came in painfully awkward circumstances as Trott fended haplessly at the sort of short ball that will be de rigeur for England’s batsmen in the looming Ashes campaign – convinced Trott and his supporters that international cricket is now beyond him.

Image Id: ~/media/6A458D1243B144A69FF115AD8E9BCD7ATrott leaves the field in the West Indies // Getty Images

The rationale for taking him to the Caribbean, as ex-England captain Nasser Hussain wrote in his Daily Mail column this week, was to gauge whether the strides Trott had made at county level could carry him back to the performance levels he enjoyed for so many of his 52 Tests and 68 ODIs.

“He has been one of England’s great number threes, so they (the national selectors) were entitled to find out whether he still had it or not,” Hussain wrote.

“Just imagine if Trott goes back to county cricket and again smashes runs for Warwickshire while, perhaps, someone else is struggling against Australia.

“There would have been a clamour for him to come back again but now we know that his problems against the short ball are too serious to overcome.”