Marcus Trescothick’s autobiography is partly a cricket book: only a fan could take in all the numbers of Trescothick’s matches for Somerset and England, and the large numbers of sporting stars that people the story. But it is also an important account of one man’s anxiety and depression, ailments that curtailed Trescothick’s England test career. The book’s treatment of the Somerset opener’s problems is the main reason why Coming Back To Me received the Sports Book of the Year award for 2008. In the following decade there has been a steady stream of stories about sports-people’s mental health, but Trescothick was a trail-blazer in going public about his anxieties.
As a batsman, Marcus Trescothick has a record that places him in the top level of England cricketers. Between 2000 and 2006 he scored nearly 6,000 test runs with an average of 43, making 14 test centuries. He was a vital member of the England side that won the Ashes in 2005. At his best he was difficult to bowl to, amassing big totals – 5 of his centuries were scores of more than 150. But he was always a home bird who found it difficult to leave his wife Ellie at home. Only 3 of his 14 Test centuries, and 3 of his 12 one-day centuries were scored out of the UK.
Mental toughness and the ability to cope with pressure are valued assets for most sports. Showing signs of weakness to the opposition, or even to your own team-mates and management, is likely to result in a probing of those weaknesses designed to make you crack. For an opening batsman in cricket, facing a hard ball bowled at over 90 miles an hour, with only one life before the innings ends, it is essential to give the impression of confidence and invulnerability. Particularly when that batsman is surrounded by opposing fielders not averse to ‘sledging’, the use of teasing and insults aimed at unsettling the player at the crease. Trescothick’s struggles with homesickness and anxieties about travel had to remain secret. Like many other people he found it increasingly difficult to maintain a public image at odds with his own self-perception. In the end it led to a breakdown, first leaving a tour of the Indian sub-continent in February 2006, and then coming home from Australia before the first Ashes Test in the winter of 2006, and finally unable to get on a plane for a Somerset engagement in Dubai in 2008.
Coming Back To Me tells a very intimate story of Trescothick’s unwillingness to discuss or reveal his anxieties, of the lies he told – to himself as well as to his manager and the Press. He describes the anxiety attacks, and the strategies he used early in his career to distract himself on overseas tours. He talks about his use of Sporting Chance, and a psychologist. He talks about the doubts around using anti-depressants, and the worry that they might affect his reflexes and hand-eye coordination. (His use of medication in 2006 was kept secret from the England team captain and manager.) He even shares the sledging by Pakistani bowlers in the home tests in 2006, which mocked his mental health troubles – and the Australian fast bowlers were still to come. More to the point, he also reveals his reactions to such sledging, a violent reaction that showed how much the barbs had hit a sensitive spot.
Although Marcus Trescothick’s England career ended in 2006, he continued to play for Somerset until 2019, some ten years after this book’s publication. In so doing, he brought to a much wider public the hidden world of sporting mental health. Trescothick’s anxiety and depression took a particular form in part dictated by the particular stresses of a batsman going on foreign tours, but his story will have points of recognition for many, not least for the importance of supporting family and friends during his darkest moments.
Trescothick, Marcus; with Hayter, Peter (2008) Coming back to me: the autobiography, London, HarperSport