The importance of failure

Success can dazzle, even blind. It's in failure that those like Jonathan Trott can address their weaknesses

Rob Steen in Cricinfo

March 19, 2014

 

Jonathan Trott: mired in a personal trough © AFP

What happened to me? Did I lose my talent? Am I ever going to be good again?

Find me a public performer who hasn't echoed Bill Murray's self-pitying, crestfallen lament in Wes Anderson'sThe Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. Jonathan Trott might have served his cause better had he plumped for such candour and simplicity - it might even have spared him Michael Vaughan's intemperate outburst - but no matter. Depression, stress, burnout, anxiety, panic - variations on the theme of mental unfitness are endless.

"I remember day two or three, it was a bit of a blur, I was getting headaches and all sorts of things and I wasn't eating properly towards the end and that's when the sleep started getting disruptive and emotionally that was when I was worst and it just boiled over. I had nothing left in the tank - mentally and emotionally pretty drained." The number of appearances of the word "and" in the first of those sentences tells us a lot.

As Trott recounted his feelings during last November's Brisbane Ashes Test to Sky Sports viewers, the memories jostled for breathing space; a disorderly queue of negative emotions was being flushed out. Eye contact was strong and certain, but that doesn't mean the scars don't hurt. Amid more measured comments, yes, those references to "crazy" and "nutcase" were supremely insensitive - one of the few things Vaughan was right about in his own insensitive, somewhat hypocritical tirade (well, he did resign the captaincy of his country mid-series). But perhaps Trott felt that distancing himself from a graver clinical condition was a necessary part of his recovery. The message was plain: "I can be good again… I will be good again."

A few years back, "burnout" was a genuine and growing concern: even before the IPL was a glint in the BCCI's eye, multiplying formats and a concertina-like international programme were placing an ever-increasing strain on the leading performers. Then came the domestic T20 eruption; now all bets were off. Now "burnout" was the fear that dare not speak its name. If the players chose to spread themselves even thinner, well, that was their funeral. Frankly, my dear, who gave a damn? Trott's travails should compel us to think anew, with greater compassion. The employers who arranged 61 Tests for their charges over the past five years have far more to answer for on that score than they do over the way they handled his sudden fall from grace.

Older readers might find themselves harking back 40 years to a similar episode involving Geoff Boycott, whose intensity Trott has always seemed bent on emulating, as Mark Ramprakash did before him. The superficial cause was Boycott's repeated humiliations by bowlers of trifling gifts, primarily Eknath Solkar (such is the contempt in which the Yorkshireman holds the late Indian left-arm swinger, the latter is not even accorded the respect of a forename in Boycott's first autobiography, published in 1987).

"Batting to me is more than a mechanical use of techniques," Boycott explained. "I have to feel in a good frame of mind if I am to do well." There was a lot preying on it: difficulties over his benefit season, a rotten start to the summer by Yorkshire, and the usual internecine squabbles at Headingley, let alone the selectors' galling - as he saw it - preference for Mike Denness as England captain over his own claims.

	When nothing is working as it should, as had been the case for Trott since August 2013, convincing oneself that class truly is permanent and that form can only ever be temporary can tax the hardiest of hearts

The tipping point was another cheap dismissal in the first Test at Old Trafford. Nor did it help that it was "glaringly obvious that Denness wanted about as much to do with me as the Black Death". In taking stock, attested Boycott, "I realised, to my horror, that the desire and drive to play for England had gone. There was no satisfaction in it, very little involvement, even less pleasure… I couldn't take it any longer."

He duly informed Alec Bedser, the chairman of selectors, that he was "in no mental or emotional condition to play well for England". Yet when he put the phone down he felt no relief, and certainly no better. By the time he reached Bath, for Yorkshire's match against Somerset, he was "low, confused and physically ill… it might have been stress-related, I really don't know, but it was real and painful enough".

That September, by when his reign as Yorkshire captain was under threat, he did the unthinkable: he turned his country down. "Had anyone mentioned the mere possibility of it to the kid who played in the South Yorkshire back-streets or the young man who battled his way into the Yorkshire and England sides, he would have been invited to go forth and multiply. I would have considered him certifiable. But the culmination of events, circumstances and attitudes was too much to resist. I knew I could not go to Australia and do a good job for England." Not for another three years would he do international battle, yet recover he did, and prosper. Trott can draw hope from that.

In an interview published in the Times last Saturday, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a Harvard professor billed by Rick Broadbent as an "expert on losing streaks", spelled out the commonalities linking sport and the world beyond. "In a losing streak everything deteriorates. There is often infighting and a lack of desire to show up for work because the situation is so unappealing. You see it in inner-city communities too, where neighbourhoods form gangs and fight against each other rather than working together." In an unusually perceptive moment, the all-too aptly named footballer Robbie Savage recalled the "soul-destroying" nature of a horrendous streak for Derby County not only robbing him of enthusiasm but reducing him to hatred for the game he once adored.

Trott, though, was mired in a personal trough. He'd gone 18 Test innings without a century before (and not that long ago). He'd also gone four ODIs without reaching 30 before, twice. This time, both happened concurrently, gnawing at his marrow.

One of the chief advantages of playing a uniquely multi-format sport is that success in one discipline can refuel another, or even persuade you to focus exclusively on a single discipline, the better to spare yourself all that angst and pain. But when nothing is working as it should, as had been the case for Trott since August 2013, convincing oneself that class truly is permanent and that form can only ever be temporary can tax the hardiest of hearts (unless, of course, your scorebook entry reads DG Bradman or SF Barnes).

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	Has a sporting figure ever treated success and failure with such startling equanimity as Rafael Nadal? Stephen Dunn / © Getty Images  Enlarge

Repeated exposure to failure can be our undoing, but it can also reinvigorate. As that hoary old saying goes, what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. For professional sportsfolk, unlike most mortals, failure, however relative, is transparent and statistical, sometimes tweetworthy, always inescapable. For all of us, what counts is how we cope with it, and the way we heed its lessons.

The challenge to those recuperating from a setback is whether to risk the self-diminishing agonies of failure again. All the more reason, then, to salute those who take that risk for our amusement, and when there is little or no apparent need. Witness Rafa Nadal, whose improbable comeback from a career-threatening injury has been immeasurably more successful than the tennis writers and even his doctors predicted.

Had that regal racqueteer's stomach churned at the prospect of failure, he would have taken one of two courses: he would never have dared return to the court (it's not as if he needed the pesetas or kudos) or, in so doing, that renowned courtly behaviour would have lapsed. Neither happened, almost certainly because Nadal possesses the quintessential prerequisite of all champions: those competitive fires still burned. Has a sporting figure ever treated those twin imposters with quite such startling equanimity?

We make much of self-assurance as the most priceless of assets. Not only does it embolden, it also enhances the power of bluff. Confidence, achievement and reputation form a virtuous circle; how often do off-form achievers prevail purely by dint of repute? Ian Botham managed just 40 wickets in his last 23 Tests, and most of those owed more to name than skill. That confidence may or may not be innate; for those whose work exposes them to daily ordeals by competitive fire, in public view, it can certainly be mercurial. One numbing or humbling failure at an inopportune time can do more to deflate it than a hundred triumphs can buoy it. It depends on how deep it runs.

Yet strength can only be enhanced by reducing or eradicating vulnerability; by logical extension, therefore, failure can be more important than success. Failure means those glances in the mirror are likelier to be stares - broodier, more searching, less self-deluding. Weaknesses are likelier to be addressed, lessons learned. Success, conversely, can dazzle, even blind. It can also deter acknowledgement of the influence exerted by sheer blind luck, an ingredient never more potent than in the competitive arts. Perhaps only the tiny ranks of the doubt-free actively desire failure - as motivation, as a counter to complacency - but maybe that's what keeps us all going. Should we fear it? No, but a spot of constructive loathing can come in handy.

Bill Murray/Steve Zissou relocated his mojo - or at least a semblance of it - with a gun, saving his crew from a band of murderous pirates. A less violent loosening-up might do Trott a power of good.

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