Deadly game

When, two decades ago, the cricket historian David Frith published his study of cricketing suicides, By His Own Hand, the book carried a foreword by Peter Roebuck. As an opening batsman, Roebuck had represented Millfield School, Cambridge University and Somerset, where he was the club captain. In his second life he proved to be a quirky, provocative journalist, initially for the Sunday Times and eventually for several newspapers in Australia, where he lived by choice. Now he too is dead, at 55, by his own hand.

What is it about cricket and suicide? In his research Frith found more than 80 cricketers who snuffed out their life-light, including some of the most celebrated men who have adorned the game. Arthur Shrewsbury, immortalised by W.G. Grace in his ringing phrase ‘give me Arthur’, blew his brains out in 1903. Albert Trott, who played for both England and Australia, and once struck the ball over the pavilion at Lord’s, also ended his life with a gun, as did A.E. Stoddart, who captained England in Australia. More recently, David Bairstow, who kept wicket for Yorkshire and England, hanged himself at home.

Bairstow, the most ebullient of men, died in 1998. Since then Mark Saxelby, who used to play for Nottinghamshire, has poisoned himself, so Roebuck, who was found dead outside a Cape Town hotel last Saturday, was following a well-trodden path. No other sport has been so disfigured by suicide. How is it that cricket, a game described by John Arlott, one of its finest commentators, as ‘human chess’, drives so many players out of their minds?

One reason might be that the game takes so much more out of those who play it than any other. County cricketers spend six months of every year cooped up with their peers in dressing-rooms and hotels.