Trescothick: prisoner of his own gifts

Marcus Trescothick started the Ashes tour, but returned home before the first Test © Getty Images

The light is harsh. Your opponents are in your face from the first ball to the last. The grounds are hard and huge, and the crowds some of the most combative in the world. It is almost like a boxing ring.

Australia is not a place to tour if harbouring even the smallest of self-doubts. And Marcus Trescothick had more than a few demons eating into his confidence. He'd already cracked in India. He was a walking return ticket. I wonder what he is thinking now, watching from home as his team-mates soldier on. Will he feel guilty? Will that sense of maybe having let the side down compound his troubles? He has exchanged the dressing room for the warmth of his family, and nobody should blame him. Whatever is worrying him, he has the right to choose how to deal with it.

But one or two fellow pros have measured their sympathy for Trescothick with the view that this is Test cricket, this is where you put it on the line, prove you are worthy. It's why they are called Tests. There is merit in the argument. There are worse ways to make a living.

I spoke to Trescothick last summer, midway through the season as he was battling poor form. He sounded upbeat, smiled a lot and spoke confidently about the future. He had his game in place and reckoned it was only a matter of time before it clicked. He'd been through ordinary spells before and he'd always come back stronger. He was particularly looking forward to the Ashes tour.

Then, as I was leaving, he did a quick Q&A with his sponsors. I stayed around to listen. Did he have any phobias or fears? Yes, he said. He was scared of the dark and the sea.

I thought little of it at the time but later found the answers slightly disturbing. Not that a grown man has no right to be frightened of crashing waves or the dark. But it was unusually candid of Trescothick. He could have made something up, like spiders or shopping. In retrospect, it was as if he wanted to share these fears with his inquisitor, a virtual stranger.

Maybe, even then, with his rehabilitation after the Indian episode in place, he was asking for help. It was impossible to tell.

It could be that Trescothick has never felt comfortable performing in public. It might be an accident of birth that he is both massively shy and an immensely talented cricketer.

It would not be the first time an individual had been propelled into a place to which he was not wholly suited. It must be common in daily life, but it is cruelly exposed in the world of professional sport.

I had encountered it more completely when helping Frank Bruno write his autobiography. As a tearaway youth on the streets of south London, Bruno was handed a pair of gloves and taken by his father to spend his excess energy at the local boxing club. It was a decision that would change his life.

He could not avoid reform school but once there he worked on his boxing and discovered that his size and power gave him a big advantage. He had a glittering amateur career and, inevitably, turned pro and became very rich and very famous.

But, in all that time, from his days on the street to the night he beat Oliver McCall to become heavyweight champion of the world, Bruno struggled to conquer his doubts. That he managed it once, that he fulfilled his dream, was testimony to his courage. But it could not disguise the frailty of his psyche. He was always living up to the expectations of others, both his management and the adoring public.

When Bruno retired, his life was stripped of purpose. He did panto, he opened supermarkets, he shook hands for a living. But that which had driven him since he was 10 had gone and would never return. For all his fears in the ring - and he had as many as any boxer - the deeper darkness lay outside.

Trescothick's problems have been on going throughout the last year © Getty Images

For all its hardships, for all the sacrifices, boxing had given him the one path in life on which he felt at home. The gym was his living room. The road was where he did his thinking. The fights were his testing ground. Sometimes he failed, but he came back until he had put to rest the doubts he had about his own ability. He rose to the occasion and proved nearly everyone wrong. It vindicated his existence.

When I sat with Frank to trawl over his life, he always felt happier talking about boxing. It was painful for him to think about the bad days, the crazy nights driving through the countryside till dawn and the days in a secure unit after his mind cracked.

And yet competing also scared him. He was honest enough to admit it. He described the almost insurmountable wall of apprehension that built up around him the night he lost his title to Mike Tyson. I'm not a psychiatrist, but I think that was the night everything started to unravel for Frank.

I am not for a minute comparing Trescothick's situation with Bruno's. The circumstances and the details are probably widely different. But each of them found both satisfaction and dread in their chosen sports. They became prisoners of their athletic gifts.

The choice Trescothick has to make is to either embrace cricket again, and maybe find some sort of solace at the crease, or walk away from the game for ever. It will be the hardest decision of his life.