Choking - 'It took 10 years to recover': the story of Scott Boswell and the yips

The 2001 C&G Trophy final was supposed to be one of the best days of the cricketer's life. But then he bowled a wide …

Scott Boswell runs in to bowl his sixth wide of the over against Somerset and becomes despondent during the C&G Trophy final at Lord's in 2001. Photograph: Rebecca Naden/PA Archive/PA Ima

Scott Boswell is sitting in the school canteen at Trent College, tucking into his lunch. The kids he teaches are swarming around him. But his mind isn't quite here. It's turning back to 1 September 2001. The C&G Trophy final at Lord's. He thinks about it a lot, but hasn't discussed it much in public. This is the first newspaper interview he has given since. He told plenty of journalists to "eff off", because, he says, "it literally took me 10 years to get back from it."

What if you got your shot and you blew it? What if you had the chance to realise a dream you had harboured since childhood and it went horribly wrong?

Boswell was 26, seven years into his career. He had settled at Leicestershire, where he was enjoying one of his best seasons yet. He had become a regular in their one-day side. They were on a good run, too, winning 11 out of 13 in the old Sunday league, easing through the rounds of the C&G Trophy. In the semi-final, a home tie against Lancashire, Boswell took four for 44, all of them England players. They were the best figures of his career. And they took his team to the final, where they would play Somerset. "It was," he says, "going to be one of the best days of my life."

Most cricket fans will remember what happened. Many of the rest may know about it from YouTube, where, as Boswell says with wry pride, he "has had well over a million hits", plenty of them from the children he coaches. The video is called "The Worst Over Ever?" Six of his first eight balls are wides. There were, at one point, five in a row. The bemused batsman, Marcus Trescothick, hits a couple of the straighter balls for four. It lasted 14 balls and it ended Boswell's first-class career.

"I had heard about people getting the yips gradually," Boswell says. "But I got the yips because of an occasion. I choked." It has taken him a long time to be able to use that word. He can laugh about it now, just about. "It's OK when the jokes are on my terms, but when somebody comes to me and talks about it, even a little kid, I find it a little bit raw." If the pupil is old enough, he will explain that what happened that day cost him his job. What he doesn't say, has only recently admitted to himself, is that the trauma of it has shaped his life since.

It began the night before the final. Boswell hadn't been at his best in the weeks since the semi. He knew it and so did everyone else. The coaches were in two minds about whether to pick him and told him as much. In meeting that night a senior figure at the club told Boswell "not to fuck up". That stuck in his head. Finally, late the next morning, they told him he had been selected. "And I thought: 'Bloody hell.'"

He was, he says, "a nervous cricketer". His action, he admits, "wasn't a biomechanical dream". But the first over was fine. "Peter Bowler cut me for four. But I felt OK." When he came back for his second, Trescothick was on strike. Boswell's head started to swim. He had been struggling to bowl to left-handers. Suddenly Trescothick "looked as though he was 50 yards away. He was like a tiny dot. I just couldn't see him. Then I bowled a wide and I heard the noise of the crowd. I bowled a second wide, and the noise got louder and louder and louder." His muscles grew tight. His fingers grew tense. He began to sweat. "I just couldn't let go of the ball. I wanted to get on with it, so I began to rush. The more I panicked, the more I rushed." He lost his run-up. The pitch, already on a slope, seemed to tilt sharper beneath his feet. He makes it sound like vertigo.

No one spoke to him. He didn't want to talk anyway. He just wanted to get it over with. The umpire, George Sharp, finally said, out of the side of his mouth, "keep bowling". Boswell thought: "Jesus Christ. I am going to be bowling here all bloody day." He was terrified that the over would never end. "'I was thinking: 'I just want to get this over, I just want to get this over' but it kept going and going and going, wide after wide after wide." Some flew to slip, others flew towards fine leg. The video is harrowing.

Finally it was over. 2-0-23-0. Boswell went down to fine leg. The ball came his way. "I can dive for this." He did. And he missed it. Worse, he tore up a lump of the Lord's turf. "It landed on my head. So I was lying on the floor and I look up and there are 2,000 people behind me, and I see the ball trickling over the boundary. I have this bleeding lump of turf on my head. I thought: 'Fucking hell. This can't get any worse. Get me off this field.'" He froze. Literally. "There was a water bottle five metres away from me. My mouth was so dry. But I couldn't move. I couldn't walk five metres to go and get it." The Somerset fans chanted "Bring on the Boswell! Bring on the Boswell!" That, he says, "haunted me for a couple of years".

Leicestershire lost. "We were playing Gloucestershire on the Monday after the final. Nobody spoke to me, I just wasn't playing, that was it. I wasn't told." Only one close friend, the former England bowler Jimmy Ormond, tried to talk to him. "People would just walk past me. But Jimmy took me out for a pint and he just said: 'What the hell happened there?' He was the only person who confronted me, the only person who I talked to about it. But all I could say was: 'Yeah, what did happen there?'" Leicestershire tried to send him to a sports psychologist, but he just wasn't ready to talk about it. Then the emails started to come. Hundreds of them. Some sympathetic, some ugly, the worst accusing him of match-fixing.

Two weeks later, Leicestershire sacked him. Then they asked if he would play one last match, against Nottinghamshire in the Sunday league. They needed to win to secure the title. He wasn't thinking straight. So he said yes. Just before the game began he was hiding, crying, in a shop near the ground. "I was absolutely terrified." He came on first change and bowled a wide. "I heard a couple of people cheer and that was it." The over cost 18 runs. So he feigned cramp and ran off the field. He spent five hours sitting in the changing room, stunned. There had barely been a day in the past 10 years when he hadn't bowled a cricket ball, up and down, one end to the other, and now he just couldn't do it. "And that was it. I disappeared."

A week later Boswell started life in what he calls "the real world", as a salesman for a cricket company. On his first day he spent five hours in a traffic jam on the M6 thinking: "Oh my God." He wanted to carry on playing. A couple of clubs offered him deals, decent money. He went up to Preston and bowled fine in the nets. But in a match "I couldn't let go of it. It was going from my hand to the keeper, to third slip, I had no idea. I felt sick. I would actually be sick. I was throwing up all over the place. I couldn't do what I had been doing for so long."

Different men have dealt with the yips in different ways. Some resign themselves to it, quit bowling, or even cricket. Boswell couldn't let the game go, didn't want to, but the disorder got to him. "I dwelled on it for a long period of time." He began to get depressed. "I put on a lot of weight and I was drinking a lot. I didn't socialise, I lost a lot of friends. But I didn't do anything about it, because I thought: 'I'm a man and men don't do those things.'" He had a heart operation in 2006. He woke up one morning in hospital and thought: "I can't go on living like this." That was the first turning point. The second was at a barbecue, when a friend told him he should take a place on training programme for new teachers being run in a local state school. The third was when his wife, "my rock", went to a life-coaching course, and, as a couple, they learned about the power of positive thinking.

Boswell was still playing. And he still couldn't bowl. He was a batsman for a club side in Leicestershire. "There was a guy there called David Pounds, a club cricketer. We were playing a second XI match and he forced me to bowl. I bowled a 28-ball over. The opposition were OK, because he had told them about me. But I hated it. The ball was going everywhere." And then, it happened. "My 28th ball, I landed it. I got an lbw. Everybody ran up to me and I was on the floor in tears. I was the most embarrassed man in the world, but I had a wicket.

"After that, I gradually began to get back to bowling." Now, at the age of 38, Boswell can put the ball wherever he wants. "But it is always there in the back of my head, when I'm bowling it will pop into my head: 'I could bowl a wide, I could bowl a wide.'" Just hearing the phrase "leg side wide" still causes fluttering thoughts of panic. In 2009 he was playing for Kibworth Second XI when they got to a Lord's final. Boswell was 12th man. And of course someone got injured. "I had to go on the field. Bloody hell, I was holding back some tears." But it felt good. Like he had confronted his demons.

Boswell says he thinks too much. He has spent a lot of time trying to understand what happened and why. He had to turn off the TV during the fifth Ashes Testwhen Simon Kerrigan was bowling. He doesn't doubt that Kerrigan "yipped up". He knew exactly what he was going through. "The occasion got to him and he couldn't let go of the ball. I found it too hard to watch. I would like to speak to him and it would be interesting to know how the coaches have spoken to him. It is a mental thing, not a technical thing. The one thing he has to do is get back bowling again, quickly. You have to get back on the horse."

Like a man who has acquired his medical knowledge from reading up on his own disease, Boswell has become an excellent coach, enthusiastic and knowledgeable. Trent College play up to 12 matches each Saturday, with as many as three teams in each year. They even run umpiring and scoring courses. He has learned to love the game and its simple pleasures all over again. He has been doing his ECB level four coaching course at Loughborough, along with Graham Thorpe and Jimmy Adams. "I never used to think much when I was a player, but now I'm always reading about coaching, always learning about it." He went to see England play Pakistan, just to watch the warm-up drills. "It's so sad, but I find that the most interesting bit."

Boswell doesn't say it, maybe doesn't even realise it, but his approach to coaching has obviously grown out of his own experiences. He is happy to show his vulnerable side to his students and he is extremely careful with his words, always mindful that a few poorly chosen ones ("don't fuck up") can scar. He tries to make sure that there are consequences for everything the teams do in training – they don't get kit unless all 11 of them average a certain score, as a team, on his fitness tests – so they are ready for the pressure when it comes. And – a glorious twist this– he has even invented a bowling mat which lights up when you hit a good length, which he is hoping to release commercially.

"Sometimes," Boswell says, "I wonder if I hadn't played that match, would I still be playing cricket professionally? But then I tell myself that this happened for a reason." This year, for the first time in a long time, he didn't play a game of cricket. "I had put it to bed. I could bowl. I could bat. I had never been happier."

The injury that has no quick fix. Brearley on Depression

by Mike Brearley in Cricinfo

	"Snapping out" of depression isn't an option © Getty Images

 

Depression is a terrible thing. People struggle to describe it to those who aren't subject to it: darkness, pointlessness, worthlessness; a black dog, perhaps, or a nuclear winter of the soul. There are often suicidal thoughts, which can dominate consciousness. Depressed people can't concentrate, can't think, feel lethargic, guilty, worthless and irritable. There may well be disturbance in sleep, and in eating and digestion. Some turn to drugs or drink. Those in its grip often seem addicted to suffering, helpless and hopeless. There is inadequate understanding of what it is about, why it has taken such a hold. 

And, of course, there's no reason why cricketers more than anyone else should be immune: the image of Marcus Trescothick hunched up in a corner of an electronic-goods shop at Heathrow while his Somerset team-mates prepared to board a flight to Abu Dhabi for a pre-season tournament remains a haunting one even four years later.

For sportsmen and women - but in particular men - depression has often been a badge of shame, especially in a world that values confidence, courage and the supposedly manly virtues of strength and assertiveness. When Trescothick's return home from England's tour of India in early 2006 was first explained, it was put down to a virus, which later changed to a "stress-related illness", still the terminology often used when his condition is discussed today. By the time Mike Yardy left the World Cup in 2011, the ECB did feel able to cite depression as the reason. This was a step in the right direction, but the reluctance to be open in the first place about Trescothick's plight stems, I believe, from a long-held idea that we should be thick-skinned and resilient; that to admit fear or unhappiness would be to lay oneself open not only to ridicule but to being dropped from the side (the very word "dropped" hints at the link to early-life anxieties and the insecurities of the baby). We are not supposed to be vulnerable, certainly not to show vulnerability. We don't wear our hearts on our sleeves - particularly not we English.

The proliferation of coaches and backroom staff over recent years may, paradoxically, risk making the situation harder. In the old days, it would be one's closest team-mates to whom one might admit anxiety; they are, after all, in the same boat, and may have a less judgmental or executive response. But the willingness of players such as Trescothick, Yardy, the outwardly chipper Matthew Hoggard, the former Derbyshire captain Luke Sutton, and even that tremendous competitor Andrew Flintoff to admit to their feelings may suggest change at a societal level: depression is not quite the taboo it once was. And, unlike Trescothick and Yardy - who both felt compelled to explain their departures from tours - the others were under no obligation to talk about their emotions.

There are two separable things here: the reluctance to admit to feeling low; and the increasing willingness of players to overcome that reluctance. On the one hand, in order to be a good sportsman one must be tough, a quality which can be weakened by self-doubt and fear. Players may therefore rightly be apprehensive about too much self-doubt. On top of this, there may be a reinforcement of such apprehension from the macho attitude of those who mock ordinary doubt. It is this that leads to the shame. However, self-doubt can be a necessary resource leading to work, improvement and, in the end, greater strength, both technically and emotionally.

Keeping things bottled up can be disastrous. The New Zealand seamer Iain O'Brien, another sufferer who has felt able to go public about his condition, alluded to this process when he admitted that the potential consequences of saying nothing were far worse than the supposed shame of opening up. "I don't want to be one of those statistics," he said, referring to those cricketers - and there have been too many - who have ended up killing themselves.

Several have now risked this feared ridicule and come out as depressed. O'Brien himself was encouraged to do so after listening to a radio programme on the subject, hosted by Michael Vaughan in 2011, in which Hoggard said he felt like crying as he reached the end of his run-up during his final Test appearance, in Hamilton. The revelation was a poignant one: Vaughan was Hoggard's captain in that game. Not long before my time as a player, bowlers were reluctant to show emotion even when they took a wicket; Hoggard's openness was an encouraging sign of the times. Equally refreshing has been the respect accorded by the press to both Trescothick and Yardy. Despite inevitable pressure from their editors to get the story, journalists have been sensitive enough to allow the players to tell it in their own time. And admitting the extent of the problem may be the first step towards healing and repair.

So why the apparently growing need for healing and repair? Has depression become more prevalent for cricketers? It may be that the speeding up of life, the demand for quick fixes, the "taking the waiting out of wanting" - as the 1980s credit-card advertisement so pithily put it - make for more depression, not less. Such a culture seems to require happiness, briskness, a capacity to succeed early, and in overtly measurable ways. So cricket, with its waiting around, its lonely trudge back to the pavilion, its longueurs, its rain-breaks, may offer a testing task to the modern young man or woman.

But there must be more to it than that. For depression often arises in relation to loss, especially loss that the person cannot, for whatever reason, successfully mourn. It may be of a significant other; it may be more a matter of long separations and loneliness; or it may be of prestige, position or power, such as comes with loss of form, or decline with age, or from a realisation that one is not the only pebble on the beach. Cricket is no exception. Careers are short - few go on beyond their late thirties, unless offered a juicy contract by a Twenty20 franchise. Since most professional cricketers are in it primarily because they love the game, and since it has such intensities of effort, elation and disappointment, the loss related to retirement is bound to be painful. By the time you retire, your contemporaries in other fields will have moved onwards and upwards, while you have to start afresh. 

Most ex-professional cricketers will never again be so directly involved in doing what they are passionate about. Even jobs which involve the skills and knowledge of the sport - umpiring, coaching, commentating or writing - may seem less intensely vocational than playing at a high level, and few go into second careers which involve them as cricket did. Shakespeare, naturally, had a phrase for this general truth about life: "And every fair from fair sometime declines, by chance or nature's changing course untrimmed." For the cricketer, nature's change of course can be too early, too fast, and too damaging. Hoggard, remember, was discarded by England's Test team virtually overnight during that tour of New Zealand.

	Depression is an arrangement by which we keep from ourselves the degree of hostility we feel, turning it on ourselves, but in a way inflicting it on others indirectly

Loss is harder to bear and more likely to turn into depression if one is full of hatred. All losses evoke some anger: how dare you leave me! But for some it is particularly strong; loss and separation may evoke bitterness and anger such that in the imagination there are murderous impulses to the person one misses. New Zealand's Lou Vincent, who was dropped on more than one occasion, told the Independent: "I was passionate about playing for New Zealand. But how many times can you be let down by something that you love? It's like the love of your life, she takes you back and she drops you. How many times can you have your heart broken?" Since that person - or, in the case of Vincent, that organisation - is often the very person one would turn to in a crisis, the hostility towards them, and the ensuing guilt, leaves the subject doubly alone. It is harder in such cases to mourn and move on.

Closely related to letting go of one's passionate activity is decline in form. Failure is stark and public. Like a king deposed, the dismissed batsman has to leave the arena; the bowler is merely taken off. The batsman may have to wait days for another chance. One little error, one good delivery, can result in total exclusion. And such outcomes are reported instantly to the public. The starkness of a scorecard that reads "Gatting b Warne 4" tells the casual observer nothing about the drama of the moment. Luck plays a big part. What's more, failures which may be a result of bad luck eat away at one's confidence, making form not only mercurial and uncontrollable, but self-fulfilling, the outcome of self-denigration. There can so easily be a vicious circle.

One type of such destructiveness happens when the person is prone to grievance: the glass is always half empty. Such a person is addicted to suffering and to inflicting suffering; he focuses on what he doesn't have, rather than what he does. He even prefers suffering - perhaps in dramatic or histrionic ways - to making the best of a bad job, and appreciating what he has. Depressed people feel passive, have no energy, a damaged sense of self. They may trade on this, stoking up the role of victim and, without realising, choose it over the ordinary struggle involved in getting on with things. As Iain O'Brien perceptively put it: "Wrapped up in it is how you value and see yourself."

Depression is more likely, too, for someone who at heart feels fraudulent, which itself is related to the weight of expectation felt by international sportsmen. Then - because that fraudulence may have been repressed - the depression can be experienced as something alien to the conscious self, a black dog, something that comes from outer space, or from a blue sky. Reflecting on his swift demise, Hoggard told Vaughan: "I was just thinking that the world was against me, that I'm rubbish, that I can't do this anymore. It just got on top of me. The self-doubt was huge."

People may be depressed at failure, but also at success. How often do we see a tennis player lose his serve immediately after breaking his opponent's? I think this is to do with guilt at triumph, at superiority. We may, in hidden ways, gloat over our defeated opponent or upstaged rival, and this may be so hard to bear that we contrive to fail rather than risk it. We may also discover that success isn't the panacea we have expected. No doubt post-natal depression has many causes, but one might be: this is not a bed of roses!

This may be hard to see in sport, partly because, as spectators, journalists and readers, our attention is so fixed on success; and those who are consistently successful are better able to accept their aggression and manage it well. But I am convinced, partly from my own experience, that we often do draw back from success, reluctant to risk gloating over a defeated rival who in the depths of our minds evokes a father or a sibling. We may also identify with that part of the other which wishes to knock the successful off their pedestals.

Depression, then, is an arrangement by which we keep from ourselves the degree of hostility we feel, turning it on ourselves, but in a way inflicting it on others indirectly. The depressed person is savaged by a judgmental inner voice, whose punitiveness mirrors the often unconscious wish to hurt the person felt to have let him down. He may also displace his bitterness and anger from the lost person on to an available target (an umpire, for example), like someone who comes home from a humiliating day at work and kicks the cat.

So the cricketer has to tolerate loss of form - and with it, perhaps, his place in the team, even his career - and the early ending of at least one of the loves of his life. It can, as Lou Vincent implied, feel like the end of a love affair, or like a sticky patch in a marriage; loss of, or decline in, bodily skill can, like later mental decline, be experienced as the surrender of the essential self. No wonder some find it unbearable. As David Frith catalogued in Silence of the Heart, published in 2001, no fewer than 150 professional cricketers had by then committed suicide. And this must have been the tip of a much larger iceberg of players who had been depressed but not gone to this ultimate. During his career, the successful cricketer also spends a lot of time travelling. Some find this separation from loved ones, especially at great distances, troublesome. One reason why, on the whole, teams do so much better at home lies here. The depression suffered by both Trescothick and Yardy was exacerbated by being far away from the people who knew them best and by the lack of a comparable support network on tour.

Of course, it can be hard to know what is going on in people's minds. But I was occasionally aware of a player being in difficulties, perhaps depressed, especially on tour. And loneliness was often at the heart of it. Some found big hotels in large cities anonymous and not conducive to feeling safe and at home. By contrast, the communal experience of staying in circuit houses or small hotels in India or Pakistan back in the 1970s, usually outside the main cities, could create a feeling of togetherness, humour and sociability that was much harder to find in the five-star luxury of a modern big-city hotel; some would stay in their rooms evening after evening, eating dinner on their own. Such patterns could be hard to notice when there was no place of focus once we were away from the dressing room, the manager's room, or the team bus, and the habit could become more addictive if morale dropped lower. A vicious circle of alienation and loneliness could ensue if no one became aware of it.

Such scenarios also happen in England. There are county cricketers who find it hard to be away even from their home town. One county captain I knew made himself available for dinner with a team member who was prone to depression during every away match. For some, loneliness is an outcome of the sheer routine of socialising on a cricket tour. A certain sameness can become limiting. Such people need other, perhaps more culturally varied, stimuli. Sometimes, one needs to get away from the close cricketing family.

During my playing days, tactful help and awareness of the problem prevented it from getting a grip on a few individuals. Captains and managers vary greatly in this important ability to be sensitive to people when they become unhappy, or aggrieved, or bored. One of Doug Insole's many assets as England manager was in this area. It would be hard to write "sensitivity to potential depression" into the job description of today's England coach. But ordinary human consideration, concern for everyone in the party, and tact should be. And occasionally that would extend to recognising that something more than ordinary friendly management is required, that a player needs to get specialist treatment, and may even have to leave the team for the time being.

	Iain O'Brien felt bottling up what he felt inside would have had far worse consequences than opening up about his condition would © Getty Images Enlarge

Despite all this, the sporting arena itself can provide an antidote, since sport does permit aggression. Many people give the impression that only on the field can they be thoroughly and spontaneously themselves, though here again, this can make retirement, or absence through injury or poor form, feel like a loss of the true self. But at least the sportsman might be helped to avoid depression by the fact that sport has aggression built in. What is not so readily permitted in its ethos is envious rivalry with one's own team-mates. I think it's impossible not to feel some envy at the successes of a colleague who is vying with you for a place, and this can arouse guilt and shame. So aggression can be a problem when one can't enlist it, and also when one can but with too much or inappropriate venom or force.

Sporting teams are, as I've suggested, tough social groups, and the effect can be amplified in cricket, where the participants spend so much time with each other. Vulnerability may not be respected. Professional cricketers can be quick and perceptive, often cruelly so. The dressing room is not an easy place in which to hide. The rough and tumble, the sarcasm and mockery, are mostly friendly, but can also become bullying, the stuff of small boys in school playgrounds. In short, for some cricketers, aggression causes problems rather than provides a safety valve.

Perhaps what I have suggested in relation to both loss and aggression could be summed up thus: what doesn't kill you - or make you depressed - leaves you stronger. The tipping point can be hard to predict, perhaps the outcome of chance and the presence or absence of the right person, or the right piece of good luck, at the right time. Sport can indeed be an antidote to depression. I remember a time when I was in turmoil in my personal life; batting and playing, however difficult to do well, provided an arena in which life's aims and objectives were for a while simplified. It is not easy to hit a hard ball delivered with speed and skill by a fellow professional, but facing it does, like imminent execution, concentrate the mind.

And yet there is no escaping the profundity of depression - nor, as I noted at the beginning, the difficulty among non-sufferers of grasping it. As Trescothick said: "There's so much to it. People say: 'Pull yourself together, move on.' I wish it was that simple. You try to forget, but it takes over your whole life." Our understanding of this crippling condition, especially in the sporting arena, may merely have scratched the surface. And even when something is recognised and acknowledged, it is still hard to know what's best for the sufferer. Sportsmen want, above all, quick fixes, as with physical injury. The trouble is, established patterns can take a long time to shift. 

Mike Brearley played in 39 Tests for England between 1977 and 1981, captaining them in 31, of which 18 were won and only four lost. He is a practising psychoanalyst