Trott’s greatest wish Batsman hopes his former team-mates can end feud
Jonathan Trott believes new England film is a chance to bury hatchet, he tells
The room in which we are seated can be no more than four square metres, but Jonathan Trott reckons it would be just perfect. “I actually want to get us all in a space like this,” he says. “Lock the door. Put a few beers out. See what happens.”
The “us” is England’s cricketers between 2009 and 2014 who, having soared to the unprecedented height of world No1 in all three forms of the game, would nosedive in an equally spectacular fashion. A culture of “mocking, bullying and ridicule” was what Kevin Pietersen alleged in his autobiography and, with every other player having had their say during the five years that have passed, Trott now senses the chance to draw a line.
“Whenever I do a Q and A, I get asked about Swann, Prior, Pietersen, Broad – all that stuff,” he says. “I always say, ‘Prior and Pietersen – the two Ps. The two inches between their names on the autograph bat is the closest you will ever get them back together’. It is a huge shame.
“There were a lot of individual people but to be an international sportsman you have to be very individual. What we did for that period of time is get all the individuals going in the same direction; all focused on the same prize. It was very powerful. I would prefer that than having 11 good team guys, not quite sure where they are going, and just worried about being good team-mates.”
An opportunity for some form of reconciliation looms. Their collective story is charted in a new film, The Edge, which will premiere in London a week on Wednesday and which superbly details not just the rise and fall but the stark, wider context both of what they achieved together and the extreme pressures they faced. With contributions from all the key players, it above all raises important questions about the balance between an uncompromising, all-conquering and relentless sporting environment and the impact on its participants and their mental health.
“I hope they all turn up to this premiere,” Trott says. “I’m going to badger Kevin: send a car to his house to pick him up. I think it would be OK. It would be, ‘You were being an idiot … no, you were being an idiot’. And that’s it. Handbags. They wouldn’t be great players without a great team. We achieved it so quickly that we couldn’t quite bottle it.”
From being filmed batting all alone in a huge field of wheat amid the mantra “concentration is the absence of irrelevant thought” to then being portrayed sinking through water in his pads, Trott emerges as the film’s most compelling character. He can smile about how the buoyancy of the cricket pads meant being weighted down to film the underwater scene, but the passage of time does not ease some of the more harrowing testimony. It was during the ostensibly successful summer of 2013 – England reached the final of the Champions Trophy and sealed a third straight Ashes series win – that the warning signs can first be identified.
“We lost the Champions Trophy and I was, ‘I’m not losing anything else’ and I pushed and pushed. I raced to 40 in the first Test, playing beautifully and then I dragged one on. I turned and almost smashed the stumps. It wasn’t me. I was angry. I was very much caught up in trying to outscore everyone. I had averaged 90 against Australia.
I then averaged 37.
When I look at it now, that series was OK. At the time I thought it was a train wreck.”
Trott was one of only three players also to feature in the one-day series and he then still continued training four hours a day for two weeks before heading straight into yet another Ashes series in Australia. “I got to the first
Test and I was toast,” he says.
“I was not eating properly and three kilos lighter.
I remember suddenly feeling like I was being attacked. It was really terrifying, but my mentality was, ‘OK just work harder’.”
That manifested itself one day in turning up the bowling machine on himself to its fastest speed, 95mph. Alastair Cook was in an adjacent net and can recall seeing Trott hit hard at least 20 times. “He took terrible blows. It was horrible to watch,” he said. Pietersen noticed that something was wrong and suggested, in vain, to team director Andy Flower that Trott be allowed some family time.
Others saw Trott in tears at random moments during the day and it was after the first Test in Brisbane, in November 2013, that
‘It would be: You were being an idiot … no, you were being an idiot. And that’s it. Handbags’
‘We were hanging on by a thread really. We could not sustain the intensity we had’
he returned home. He had almost blacked out after being dismissed and could feel banging in his head. “I pushed myself basically to breaking point,” he says. “I had lost perspective. It became very much a life-or-death situation.”
Trott did not know what was wrong until the following April. “It was almost like, if I didn’t have depression people think I’m lying,” he said. “I tried to come back, I played a schoolboy game at Cape Town and the trees turned into the stands at Brisbane again. I hadn’t addressed what I needed.”
A call to psychiatrist Steve Peters was transformative. “I went to see him that day and knew it would be OK,” he says. “Nobody had been able to tell me what was wrong. I liked how he said, ‘I see you as a computer I need to fix’. A lot of the time psychologists don’t want to push you. Steve was more direct. I sat down and could feel other athletes who had been in that chair. It was like, ‘Jeez, I’m not alone’. Within an hour he told me what was wrong. Situation-based anxiety, which had built up through the years of pushing myself and losing perspective.”
The film also documents powerfully how others in the team were seriously struggling. “We were all hanging on by a thread really – some more and some less so,” Trott says. “We couldn’t sustain the intensity we had and also the schedule was ridiculous. Who goes back-to-back Ashes? There was also a Champions Trophy.”
The question naturally arises about the similarly intense schedule this summer for England’s cricketers. “Yeah, it’s worrying,” Trott says. “It’s not that it is World Cup, Ashes. It’s more that it is World Cup, Ashes, New Zealand, South Africa, Sri Lanka. Three tours this winter. It’s hectic. I do think players get managed better. You saw guys rested against Pakistan before the World Cup. I think families stay longer. Andy [Flower] was quite rigorous on the amount of time they were allowed.”
It is a topic that Trott and Flower have since discussed in depth, and there is a frank acknowledgement
in the film. “If I had my time again I would definitely work with the person as much as the player,” Flower says. Trott also pinpoints the increasing penetration of social media and how, by 2013, players became aware just as soon as they opened an ipad or turned on their phone of being “hammered” on Twitter. Trott’s vast range of experiences should certainly help as he embarks on a career in coaching after retiring from county cricket last summer. Trott says that he now derives greater satisfaction from coaching, but there is a wonderfully moving moment in the film, which he happily expands upon, when he is asked what he misses most about playing for England. “I don’t think I can say it,” he first replies, before a tear rolls from the corner of his right eye. “I think it’s just the partnerships that you have with the other guy. When you have a good partnership in the middle, you seem invincible in a way. I thrived on those times when you and your partner put themselves on the line. When you are bare and exposed – just the two of you against the 11 guys hunting you down. It’s a unique thing.
“I’m not going to miss cricket: the playing, the travelling, the practising. But what I am going to miss most is batting with Straussy, Cook, Pietersen and Bell. I am proud of the way that I conducted myself as an England player. I think I made everyone proud and that is all I wanted to do really.”
“The Edge” will be released in selected cinemas from July 19 and across all platforms from July 22, following a special screening featuring a Q&A with the stars, broadcast in cinemas across the UK on July 17.