It’s the week after Christmas 2021 and England’s men have just lost the Ashes. Again. After two years of preparation and planning, they have been beaten out of sight in 12 days’ play, the last three at the MCG, where they have been bowled out for 185 and 68, and gone down by an innings and 14 runs to a team who made only 267 themselves.
Covid has spread among the squad: three of the coaches have tested positive and so have four family members, despite all the precautions. They have been living in a so-called bubble for much of the past couple of months, mostly unable to mix, meet people, or even leave the hotel. And now they are being battered in the newspapers, on TV, radio and social media: “Embarrassing, abysmal, humiliated”; “This has to be one of the worst England teams to play ashes cricket PATHETIC”; “You are an embarrassment to the Three Lions”.
But the Test players aren’t the only English cricketers in Australia that winter. There are 18 others playing in the Big Bash, some of them international teammates: Ben Duckett, Chris Jordan, Saqib Mahmood, James Vince, Tymal Mills, Sam Billings. They are earning six figures for hitting sixes, or bowling four-over stints a couple of nights a week in matches where no one back home even really notices if they succeed or not. In between, they are doing a little warm-weather training, or are out and about, on the beach, posting a few choice photos for their friends and followers, no filters needed.
There is not a lot of pity to go around in professional sport, not when the rest of us are stumping up so much to watch the players get paid plenty well enough to make a living in a game we love. The distance between us, from our side of the television screens to the one they’re on, can make it a little too easy to forget these England cricketers are only people like everyone else, with the same sorts of flaws and weaknesses. And if you’ve ever been anywhere similar yourself, imagine how, in those moments, alone and staring at their phones, even the best-paid of the Test cricketers might have started to wonder what exactly they were doing on that tour.
The existential question facing Test cricket isn’t just whether people still want to watch it in the future, but whether people still want to play it, too, when there are so many easier and more lucrative ways to make a living in the game.
Cricket can be a hard game, and Test cricket is the hardest kind of it. In 2017, researchers in South Africa published the results of a longitudinal study into the mental health of more than 100 current and former professional cricketers under the age of 45. They found that 38% of the ones who were still playing were suffering with distress, 38% with sleep disturbance and 37% with anxiety and/or depression.
The figures were higher than have been found in similar studies of elite athletes in other sports. The problems got worse during the pandemic, when the Professional Cricketers’ Association had a threefold increase in the number of players asking for mental-health support.
Which chimes with what most people already know from the anecdotal evidence, and the accounts provided by Marcus Trescothick, Mike Yardy, Andrew Flintoff, Jonathan Trott and all the others who have spoken out about the mental stress they were under in their playing days. Most recently it was Ben Stokes.
It is two years since he took a break from the sport for the sake of his mental health while he was grieving for his father. He has spoken, with typical bravery, about being in therapy, and taking anti-anxiety medication, even in the past 15 months since he was appointed captain of the team.
Those experiences have shaped England’s cricket just as much as everything else Stokes has been through: being hit for those four sixes in Kolkata in 2016, his arrest in Bristol in 2017, and his triumphal summer two years later.
Mike Brearley, who as a former England skipper and a psychotherapist is uniquely well-qualified to make this diagnosis, has even suggested that Stokes’s captaincy is a kind of manic response to his own depression. And again, anyone who has been there may recognise there is some truth to it. You can see hints of it in Stokes’s wild energy in the field, his dogmatic optimism, and his refusal to accommodate contradictory views about what he is doing.
His captaincy is certainly a radical challenge to some of our oldest ideas about his sport. Not just whether or not it’s appropriate to play a ramp shot to the first ball of an innings, but how and why we play the game, and what we want from it in the years after the pandemic.
Stokes’s approach asks if winning is what matters most, or whether or not we enjoyed the trying. He would argue the two don’t have to be exclusive, that by putting more emphasis on the one, he is increasing his team’s chances in the other, by easing the pressure on them, and encouraging them to feel comfortable playing in the way that best suits them. But it is a fine line to walk.
Stokes has already tried it the other way, though. He has been down that road and seen where it leads. He slogged as hard as anyone on that last Ashes tour, when playing a series of grimly futile innings, 14 off 49 balls in Brisbane, 34 off 98 in Adelaide, 25 off 60 in Melbourne, like a man trying very hard to do what he imagined was expected of him by everyone else. His captaincy started, in the months afterwards, with his own answer to the very same questions he and his team were left with at the end of that series: why do we play cricket in the first place?
Where it’s come unstuck isn’t in its collision with Australia this summer, so much as its collision with all the rest of us over on this side of the ropes, and everyone struggling to adjust to this way of thinking.
Because as England head into the fourth Test of the series at Old Trafford, starting on Wednesday, their fans being are confronted with the very same sorts of questions Stokes has set his players: why do you watch the game, and what do you want from it? Is it simply to see England win, or is it to be entertained along the way?
