Michael Henderson

Hit for six | 5 January 2017

For Mark Nicholas it will always be a beautiful game; but for Jonathan Trott it has brought misery, humiliation and breakdown

Frankie Howerd, the great, if troubled, comedian, was once asked whether he enjoyed performing. ‘I enjoy having performed,’ he replied. Many top-level sportsmen would say something similar. The satisfaction often comes from having done, not always from doing. Performing offers great rewards, but it can also leave scars that heal slowly, and sometimes not at all.

Jonathan Trott was a good cricketer in a strong England team that beat Australia in three successive series between 2009 and 2013. Batting at No. 3, he made a century on his Test debut, and became a dependable, if minor-key player in the side that vanquished the Aussies Down Under two winters later.

Then, frightened by the view, he fell off that high wire. Returning to Australia in November 2013, he was immediately confronted by Mitchell Johnson, a left-arm bowler of ferocious pace, and lost his nerve and his place in the side. He tried to come back two years later in the West Indies, but was no longer the batsman he had been. The game had moved on. His Test career was a thing of the past.

Unguarded, which is essentially a memoir of that miserable Australian experience, does not really live up to its name. Trott reveals, at length, how humiliated he felt at being unmanned by his ordeal at the hands of an abnormally fast bowler, though the humiliation fell some way short of the crack-up that was originally offered as a reason for his withdrawal. But, as he writes ‘I don’t know’ no fewer than four times on one page, he continues to play his bat very close to his front pad. This is not a book that reveals a great deal that people did not already know.

Despite the best efforts of George Dobell, a sympathetic ghost, Trott emerges as one of those sportsmen who know little about the world beyond the boundary.

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