For players mostly, but also for fans.

Our latest Wisden piece delves into how Jonathan Trott went from his normal run-gathering self in early 2013 to down and out by the end of the year. It also takes a quick look at how his Warwickshire team-mate ended up worn down by international cricket by his early-30s.

It also highlights that 2021 schedule we were on about the other day.

The latest instalment of ‘seemingly random screengrabs from ECB videos’ brings us Chris Tremlett busting out of a black shirt and Jonathan Trott either fed up with his cold, pondering his own mortality or drifting off into a coma or something.

Just look at the strain on those poor buttons. Chris Tremlett is no longer suited to human clothing.

We’ve no idea if this is the kind of thing the ECB are hoping to get out of their social media ‘presence’.

It’s from a nice little thing about the 2010/11 Ashes that also involves Mike Atherton and Matt Prior.

Sam writes:

My shelves are groaning under the weight of cricket autobiographies.

The best – among them Coming Back To Me by Marcus Trescothick and Nasser Hussain’s Playing With Fire – are well-thumbed.

The others tend to blur together. Tales of pushy parents, age group potential, Test debuts and tearful retirements can almost be written by numbers.

If you’re feeling particularly masochistic, give Michael Vaughan’s A Year In The Sun a whirl. Bet you won’t make it to the end without chewing your own face off.

When Jonathan Trott’s new effort appeared on my doormat, I raised a sceptical eyebrow. Would this tell me anything I didn’t already know?

I needn’t have worried. Unguarded is a wonderfully honest, brutally painful account of how one of England’s most reliable batsmen decided he could bear the pressure no longer.

As a long-time Warwickshire fan, I have followed Trott’s progress since his county debut but never entirely warmed to him.

Regular readers will know all about my obsession with Trott’s middle order colleague, a chap named Ian Bell.

While Bell flashed, dashed, posed and perished, Trott was the guy at the other end. A solid plodder, quietly getting on with the job.

Needless to say, as the years went by he became a firm favourite. He proved you don’t have to be a show-pony to win the hearts of England fans; you just need to score runs. Lots and lots of runs.

Most sportsmen and women sit in press conferences and burp out platitudes about how their chosen discipline has come to define their very existence.

“It means the world to me,” they gush. “I’ve worked so hard to get here.”

This is the story of a man who became so consumed by cricket that it swallowed him whole.

King Cricket once wrote an amusing piece of fiction in which Trott plays his kids at table-tennis for two whole weeks, relentlessly refuses to let them win a game and “feels immense satisfaction with his performance.”

Reading that again now, it takes on a whole new perspective. Living every second for cricket is all very well when you’re churning out the hundreds. When things started to go wrong, there was nowhere else to turn.

The book is structured in an odd way – it might have made more sense to tell the story chronologically rather than jumping around – but there is no disputing its power.

Wisely, he decides not to spend too much time on his childhood and dives straight into the beginnings of what was later diagnosed as situational anxiety.

Unusually for such a self-centered genre, each chapter features contributions from Cook, Pietersen, Ashley Giles, Andy Flower, and Trott’s wife Abi.

The other voices only serve to reinforce Trott’s fundamental character traits: decency, modesty, determination and a hard-won sense of self-awareness which was perhaps lacking during his international career.

You can buy Unguarded from Amazon here.

We don’t normally report on excerpts from cricket autobiographies because, you know, read the book.

We have to make an exception for this majestic exchange from Jonathan Trott’s Unguarded though. (We haven’t read it, but he wrote it with George Dobell, so we’re pretty confident it’s excellent.)

After Pakistan Cricket Board chairman Ijaz Butt uttered his immortal line about “some English players” and “loud and clear talk in the bookies’ circle” back in 2010, the players in question got the hump.

At nets the following morning, Trott asked Wahab Riaz: “You going to accuse us of match-fixing again?”

Quite why Trott confused Wahab with Ijaz Butt is unclear. Maybe Wahab had said something too, or maybe Trott believed Pakistan to be operating with some sort of Borg-like group consciousness. It doesn’t matter either way. What matters is Wahab’s response.

Wahab went with: “Your mum knows all about match-fixing.”

Quite apart from the fact that this was crying out for a “no, you are” riposte, this was nevertheless an excellent meaningless schoolboy insult and we heartily approve.

Trott didn’t agree and so hit Wahab round the head with his pads before attempting to throttle him.

In this weeks’ edition of The Spin, Andy Bull starts with this incident before exploring the merits of sledging with particular reference to Australia.

We’ve already said all we need to say on that matter: It’s a myth that Australia play better when they’re aggressive. What actually happens is that they become gobbier when they’re winning.

A lot of you will have assumed that England’s domestic 50-over competition had been and gone. The group stages barely outlasted July and the semi-finals took place three weeks ago.

The final, however, was scheduled for the arse end of the season, long after anyone could remember what preceded it. Warwickshire (not Birmingham Bears) beat Surrey.

There are different ways of chasing down an almost comically low total (Surrey made just 136). You can have a bit of fun or you can make bloody certain. In a final, the latter is what is required.

As such, who better to have at the crease than Jonathan Trott, a man who considers rocks flighty and unreliable on the grounds that they can be cracked and moved during ice ages.

When England dropped Nick Compton last time around, did they drop him for batting slowly and ineffectively or did they drop him for how he responded to pressure?

George Dobell has written what basically amounts to a plea for Compton to ‘dare to be dull’ over at Cricinfo. The term ‘natural game‘ is generally employed when yearning for something explosive from a batsman, but it applies here too. The confidence to play in the most appropriate way appears to be deserting England’s number three. He’s becoming weirdly skittish, which isn’t what England want, expect or need.

Back when Compton was gently eased out of the Test team in 2013, we wrote about the possibility of one day picking him again:

“Technically, you can go back, but you’d be going back to a player who’s basically been told he’s not good enough and who will therefore be a rather insecure imitation of the batsman you previously had in the team. You’d be settling for a player, rather than picking them and people pick up on that kind of message.”

Perhaps there’s something in this. Dobell alludes to his being more sensitive to criticism than most and Compton may currently be overreacting to Trevor Bayliss’s admission that he would ideally like a more dynamic top order.

It’s debatable whether or not the coach’s words were intended as a personal challenge to Compton and even if they were, he appears to have gone too far with it. This could well be overcompensation after he was dumped from his previous relationship after succumbing to paralysis, making seven off 45 balls against New Zealand when England had already secured a large first innings lead and were looking to rush to a declaration.

But that shotless batting was just a symptom. Arguably, what concerned England more was how he had responded to pressure. Sometimes you need to play shots, sometimes you need to block and leave, but a Test batsman is always, always under pressure.

Feeling himself under pressure again, Compton now seems to be going to the opposite extreme. The blocking isn’t the problem, the swishing isn’t the problem, it’s the fact that he seems easily swayed towards these extremes by outside influences.

What to do? What to do?

Compton needs to somehow find the self-confidence to plough his own furrow and we’re not sure whether this is possible. If you’re easily swayed, it’s an awful long journey to what you might call The Jonathan Trott Extreme.

Trott was a man who could plough a furrow perpendicular to all the other furrows on the field and then tell everyone else they were going the wrong way. We rather suspect you can’t teach that. Trott was quite magnificently sure of his own approach and if he was sometimes wrong, that’s a small price to pay for certainty.

Certainty is what tethers a batsman down in the storm of Test cricket. When the winds of public, media and opposition opinion roar, you need to be anchored or you’ll be dragged into behaviour that doesn’t work for you.

So if we’ve a message for Nick Compton, it’s this. When you’re feeling under pressure, don’t listen. Play your way. Sometimes you’re right, sometimes you’re wrong – but uncertainty will always equal the latter.

It’s a truism that the England players will learn from this series defeat to Pakistan. You could actually see it happening before your eyes at times: Jonny Bairstow fighting his impulses or Ben Stokes seemingly devising a batting method on the fly. We just wonder whether these players will ever get chance to demonstrate what they’ve taken from this schooling.

We touched on this a few days ago. England cricketers may well play as many Tests as their counterparts from other parts of the world – but they don’t tend to play for as long (quite possibly because of the very fact that they play more frequently).

The class of 2012

Last time England were in the UAE – which was all of three years ago – Jonathan Trott, Kevin Pietersen, Eoin Morgan, Matt Prior, Graeme Swann and Monty Panesar all learnt plenty. But what for? When did they get chance to use that knowledge?

It’s surely no coincidence that the survivors from that series – Alastair Cook, Ian Bell, James Anderson and Stuart Broad – were among England’s best-performing players this time around. Yes, even Bell – that’s how ineffectual everyone else was. Broad even had the gall to finish with England’s third-highest batting average.

The Trott template

In many ways, Trott is the archetypal England cricketer. Other than a brief aborted comeback as an opener, his Test career basically comprises one Test touring cycle from 2009 to 2012. One tour of Bangladesh, one tour of India, one tour of New Zealand, one tour of South Africa, one tour of Sri Lanka, one tour of the UAE and one full tour of Australia, plus one aborted. Funnily enough, his later reappearance provided his only tour of the West Indies.

All of those lessons learnt. No chance to demonstrate his knowledge.

The one thing in England’s credit this time around is that the comprehensive implosion of that previous side has meant that this current one is that much younger, so there is actually a decent chance of a few of them returning to the UAE if it remains Pakistan’s rented ‘home’. We wouldn’t bet on it though, because no matter what their age, very few England players endure.

What else?

As this series comes to an end, Test cricket’s kicking off elsewhere in the world with four of the five teams above England in the rankings (Pakistan are the other) currently in action. Australia are continuing their annual tradition of comforting themselves that everything’s okay during their home summer, racking up a huge total against New Zealand. Meanwhile India, the home of spin, has just played host to a masterclass from that all-time master of the art, Dean Elgar.

This article was first published on the All Out Cricket website in May 2015, but the All Out Cricket website no longer exists so we’re republishing it here.

Jonathan Trott was never a cash-in player. He was never the guy who exploited tired bowling. He never stood on anyone else’s shoulders. Trott was the man who provided the shoulders for everyone else.

It’s surely no coincidence that England’s recent period of success coincided almost precisely with the best of Trott – from a hundred on debut in the fifth Test win that secured the 2009 Ashes to another ton in Nagpur that brought about a rare series win in India in 2012. And for all the criticism he attracted, England also managed the unlikely feat of being ranked the top one-day side while he was about.

Trott was the key labourer when it came to building a team innings. He put in the foundations and built the walls and applied the mortar. The middle and lower order came in later to apply a light skim of plaster, at which point everyone congratulated them on how wonderful the room looked.

For some reason, only dramatic ‘impact’ players are ever branded talismans, but in many ways Trott was equally totemic. Perhaps he was less the showy amulet and more a rabbit’s foot concealed in an inside pocket.

Let’s have some intensity…

Midway through Jonathan Trott’s final Test tour, George Dobell wrote that the batsman had again been suffering from “too much thought, too much practice and too much analysis.” Apparently, there were times when he was in the nets by 7.30am.

This seems not merely an incorrect approach for a batsman suffering from a surfeit of intensity, but a dangerously wrong one – Trott is after all a man prone to overtraining. But while it’s easy to say he should have avoided this kind of behaviour on the grounds that it would more than likely prove counterproductive, it’s not so easy to sit still when things aren’t going well.

When you’re anxious, you want to take action. You want to take control. Nerves don’t respond well to the redoubling of efforts though. All Trott was really doing was building things up in his own mind even more. Another tireless construction project, but this time one that was crushing him.

The skittish, jumpy Trott we saw in the Windies series as well as in that aborted series Down Under wasn’t the one most of us will remember, however. The timeless Trott is just that – a man unaffected by time. A man unaffected by anything in fact. A rocky bulwark against whom waves of bowlers broke. Rocks don’t flinch or blink. They just carry on. And on. And on.

The self-contained cricketer

Some cricketers make a point of conspicuously brandishing their ‘confidence’. These are generally the guys who feel they have something to prove. The swagger and strut come alongside mental peaks and troughs. In contrast, Jonathan Trott never did or said anything to try and make people think that he was ‘the man’. He didn’t give a toss what people thought.

Trott was almost entirely self-contained and the approval or disapproval of others appeared to have little effect on him. This wasn’t a brash or demonstrative look-at-me-I-don’t-give-a-shit attitude though. He was just oblivious.

Posturing served no purpose because Trott’s brain was the only thing that affected Trott’s emotions. If he felt on top of his game, like he was going to bat all day, no-one – least of all the opposition – was going to persuade him otherwise. He seemed invulnerable to external pressures in a game that brings its fair share and if the flipside was that internal pressures were all the more debilitating, for a long time his immunity to the outside world was what made him England’s most effective batsman.

Batsmen need conviction. You can’t be second-guessing yourself with a cricket ball flying at you at 90mph. During the 2011 World Cup, Trott was criticised by some people for scoring too slowly. Rather than saying that he played a certain way, had a particular role in the team or that these people were entitled to their opinion, he instead told them that they were wrong. You can say what you like about the pros and cons of his one-day approach, but he didn’t make the even-greater mistake of being in two minds on the subject.

The weak-minded will always side with the majority view. Trott had his own ideas and scored an awful lot more runs than that majority.

How to be sledged

There’s a quite marvellous guard-marking scene in the DVD of the 2010/11 Ashes, the series that saw Trott at his best. Our man’s batting and Brad Haddin – partly irked by Trott’s automaton behaviour, but mostly just trying to get inside his head – makes a big show out of marking his guard for him. Haddin thinks that if he can interrupt Trott’s routine, he might put him off his game. Trott stands behind him while he does this, poised, not listening, staring at the line as if Haddin’s invisible.

“You don’t have to do one of yours now,” says Haddin, scraping away at the crease with his foot. Trott blanks him and waits. When Haddin moves away, he methodically draws a line in the dirt in exactly the same spot. Then he hits 168 not out.

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Our proper Jonathan Trott retirement piece is over on All Out Cricket. Other than that, here are two old posts which sum up different aspects of a top, top player.

The first focuses on the sheer relentlessness of the man – surely his defining quality. If we have a happier memory of not watching cricket than going to bed with Jonathan Trott batting in an Ashes Test Down Under and waking up to find him still doing so, we don’t know what it is.

The second is an appreciation of his bowling, which we’ll miss almost as much as his batting. Many a tense moment has been marked by a ‘get Trott on’ tweet from this writer. You can’t beat a bit of dobble at a crucial juncture in an innings.

3 minute readWith live cricket broadcast at a reasonable hour, a Test tour of the West Indies is one of our favourites when it comes to watching the game on TV. It’s a shame it comes hot on the heels of the World Cup, ahead of an Ashes and in conflict with the start of the county season. But you get what you’re given and all you can do is make jerk chicken, pour yourself a beer and slouch on your sofa making the best of things.

There are many things we’d like to see in the next few weeks. Two major hopes are for signs of good form from Jonathan Trott and James Anderson.

Trott

While England have ostensibly replaced Trott’s runs with those that have been produced by Gary Ballance, the effect doesn’t seem to have been quite the same. England’s good performances seem so closely associated with Trott’s good performances that he should really be branded ‘totemic’.

For some reason, you have to be attention-seeking to be branded a talisman. Andrew Flintoff and Ian Botham were thought of in these terms. Trott less so, but his influence seems to us to have been as great. Perhaps he’s less showy amulet and more rabbit’s foot contained in an inside pocket. England are shaky. His runs and influence are needed.

Anderson

If he plays, this will be Trott’s 50th Test. Jimmy Anderson is about to play his 100th. For a quick bowler, that is some total. However, the corollary of that is that we’ve already seen the bulk of his career. Sad to say, but it would be good to see him find form because we should savour every ball in his remaining Tests. England doesn’t produce many bowlers who are this good.

England need him as well – as much as ever, which is worrying. Where once they appeared to have a surfeit of seam bowling riches, a lot of the queue has been revealed to be illusory. Symptomatic of this is the fact that Stuart Broad is certain to play, despite not having shown any form whatsoever since his return from surgery. Fast-medium, unremarkable, largely ineffective, he somehow remains England’s first-choice opening bowler.

As ever, it seems like it’s all on you, Jimmy.

Adil Rashid

If good form from Trott and Anderson are short- to medium-term hopes, we’d also like to see England move to a place where they are less reliant on them. We’d like to see something from everyone involved, but we’d be particularly pleased if Adil Rashid can somehow get a game and a clutch of wickets.

He is, reportedly, not bowling all that well at the minute, which is a bloody shame. England’s strategy where they looked to build suffocating pressure with a battery of right-arm fast-medium bowlers now seems redundant without sufficiently reliable personnel, so it would be good to get some variety.

Everyone assumes that variety demands a fast bowler (preferably a left-armer because some of the best fast bowlers in the world are currently cack-handed and apparently that aspect is more significant than the fact that they’re good bowlers regardless of which hand they hold a pen with). But leg-spin is useful. It can provide an injection of chaos when the status quo ain’t in your favour.

Rashid is currently no Warne, but it isn’t too fanciful to assume that he could do a number on the guileless contemporary lower orders who nevertheless contribute so many runs. Plus he can bat.

Rashid would be no passenger were he to make it into the Test team, but English tradition dictates that one spinner is the default – even if you have two decent options who can also bat. Expect James Tredwell – not a feature of second division Kent’s first-class team – to play, and expect him to be judged and discarded from the one-day side on the basis of his Test performances.