Cricket, to its bones, is an intrinsically cruel game. The long hours of waiting and staring in bare pavilions. The long weeks of isolation and introspection on tour. The brutal finality of a batting dismissal. The brutal exposure of bowling. The interminable monotony of fielding. A ball hard enough to break your fingers, to bruise your ribs, even to kill you. The heat. The rain. The way it eats up whole chunks of your life, from morning to evening, from dank spring to chilly autumn. And at its highest levels, not just the furnace of external judgement but the existential angst of a sport that has never quite reckoned with its imperial and class-based contradictions.
Perhaps it is little wonder, then, that in recent years the misery memoir has become one of the richer seams of modern cricketing literature. Marcus Trescothick’s Coming Back to Me is not really an inquiry into an English batting genius but rather a case study in debilitating mental illness. Michael Vaughan’s Time to Declare is less a celebration of an Ashes-winning captain and more a portrait of subsequent breakdown and decline. Two of England’s finest all-rounders, Ben Stokes and Andrew Flintoff, have written painfully about their depression.
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