The Weight of the Spotlight

A walk through cricket's awkward relationship with mental health. Trigger warnings apply.

Credit: Joey Guidone

As you read this, the England men’s Test team are touring New Zealand for a three-match series. The series has recently been christened the Crowe-Thorpe Trophy, after Martin Crowe and Graham Thorpe - two of the grittiest batters from the last fifty years, both known for surviving tough bowling spells and spending long hours at the crease, and both gone too young.

Crowe died of recurring lymphoma in 2016, aged 53. Thorpe, aged 55, died in 2024.

On Sunday, August 4th, Graham Thorpe walked to the Esher railway station in Surrey and ended his life. A place of familiarity, from where he must have boarded thousands of trains, became the spot where he decided there were no more journeys left to take, not even one back home.

Coroner Simon Wickens told the Surrey Coroner’s Court in Woking that Thorpe had suffered traumatic injuries after being struck by a train.

“For the past couple of years, Graham had been suffering from major depression and anxiety,” Thorpe’s wife Amanda told Michael Atherton of The Times. “He was so unwell in recent times and he really did believe that we would be better off without him.”

She spoke of the shadows that had slowly engulfed her husband’s mind. This was a man unravelling, slowly succumbing to the weight of his own misery. Amanda recalled the moment when the extent of Graham’s struggle crossed an alarming threshold. “This led him to make a serious attempt on his life in May 2022, which resulted in a prolonged stay in the intensive care unit.”

In the months after that episode, a flicker of hope had emerged, small moments when the clouds would part and the Graham of old would beam out at the world. Amanda hoped that he would wriggle out of his misery and find a way back home. “He continued to suffer from depression and anxiety, which at times got very severe. We supported him as a family and he tried many, many treatments but unfortunately none of them really seemed to work.”

Seven hundred and fifty mornings came and went after that first attempt, each a reminder of the abyss he was stuck in, until Graham Thorpe could not take the pain anymore.

Thorpe’s international career began in 1993 with a combative century against Australia, a backs-to-the-wall innings that foreshadowed the grit that would define him. He ended his career with a run-a-ball flourish, as if to showcase his range one final time. Between those bookends lay ninety-eight Test matches, during which Graham Thorpe stood as a bulwark for a fragile England batting lineup. His international record - 6744 Test runs at an average north of 44 - is a statistical epitaph most would trade a limb for.

In the last decade, Thorpe returned to the England dressing room as a batting coach. He was part of a group that revolutionised England’s white-ball batting approach, starting with an emphasis on hitting more boundaries, which helped them land an ODI World Cup title. Two and a half years from that gloriously bright afternoon at Lord’s, England were flying out of Australia after an Ashes series where they copped as many bruises as they scored runs.

Thorpe, along with the rest of the coaching staff, was sacked. The post of batting coach is now manned by Marcus Trescothick, Thorpe’s teammate for many years and the cricketer responsible for bringing anxiety and depression into the mainstream cricket lexicon, shining a light on the subcutaneous cancer eating away at the sport.

At the turn of the century, cricket’s suicide rate in England - 1.77 per cent - was higher than the British national average of 1.07 per cent. Australia’s cricket suicide rate was 2.75%, and South Africa was at 4.12%.¹

Cricket’s nomadic nature - boarding flights every other day and living on hotel tea bags and room service-food - leaves an unseen toll on every player. At an earlier time, players were known to suffer from homesickness during tours that lasted months. Later, the fatigue came from constant travel and play, from a body that rarely got the chance to rest and recover, and a mind that spent long stretches away from the comfort of its favourite things.

Marcus Trescothick had felt that weight from early in his career. Youth and the thrill of playing for England concealed the pain at first, but it would keep coming back, each time more intense, leaving deeper scars on his mind.

England’s tour of Pakistan in 2005 sent up the first smoke signals of serious distress. His wife Hayley wanted him to come home after her father had fallen off a ladder. Weeks later, her grandfather passed away. Trescothick struggled during the games but somehow kept at it, bound by a sense of national duty. He came home at the end of the tour and found that his eight-month-old daughter did not recognise him.

A few months later, England were preparing to tour India. This time, Trescothick was in no state to board the flight. His wife was suffering from postnatal depression, and he felt guilty about travelling to a different continent to play some ball. In that moment of vulnerability, he reached out to Steve Bull, then England’s sports psychologist: “Something’s not right. I don’t want to train, I don't want to practise, I don’t really want to go away next week. I’ve got no interest in what's going on at the moment.”

Eventually he went, even though his body and mind were in rebellion. During the early days of the tour, he suffered regular panic attacks at his hotel room. He reached his rock-bottom at Vadodara, where he was required to captain a tour game.

“At that point I was a shell,” he later confessed in his autobiography Coming Back to Me. “You could have taken all my kit, all my money, taken my life away. I didn't care.”

The facade finally crumbled in the dressing room, and Trescothick was sent home.

Facing the press, the team management, and Trescothick himself, fumbled for explanations. Telling the truth wasn’t an option. The team statement went with “family reasons”; Trescothick chose “picked up a bug.”

It wasn’t until 2008, when Trescothick published his autobiography, that the veil was lifted and the conversation moved to his mental health. It had been seven years since Graham Thorpe’s failing marriage was termed a “distraction”, which, in turn, was five years after legendary wicketkeeper Jack Russell wrote in his autobiography about contemplating suicide during a cricket tour to the Caribbean. And that was still more than a century after cricket, in its organised, professional form, first heard of mental illness and suicides.²

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According to a 2017 study, 37% of current professional cricketers grapple with anxiety or depression. The study also found that 38% of current professional cricketers experience distress and sleep disturbance, while 26% report adverse alcohol use.

Ego is a powerful fuel. All elite athletes need it to stare at a world record-holder in the eye; or to keep them sharp as a muscular fast bowler runs at them with eyes that want to turn a rib cage into debris. At that level, ego is a supplement to the joy of playing the sport you’ve loved all your life.

Losing that mental stimulation crushes an athlete.

Marcus Trescothick was one of the world’s premier opening batters when depression gripped him. Runs were flying off his bat, and he was amongst a small group of openers pushing the scoring-rate envelope. Leaving the stage was difficult; returning to the spotlight of international cricket, harder still.

A few months after that India tour and being diagnosed with depression, Trescothick was back in the England team. A home Test series seemed a less gruelling, more bearable experience than a tour to a different continent. He walked out with his blue helmet and Gunn & Moore bat on the first morning of England’s 2006 home season. Then he sent the Sri Lankan bowlers to all corners of Lord’s en route to a breezy 106.

This was less a resurgence and more a final, conclusive check. By the end of the summer, he stopped feeling the haptic feedback from his cover drives. The scorecard was a blur of indecipherable hieroglyphs that meant nothing to him. He was done as an international cricketer.

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Athletes at the highest level of their sport suffer from a cruel paradox. They are household names, celebrated in their team and in the stands, put on posters to attract crowds. And yet, at their most invincible, they are still vulnerable to the weight of anxiety and the crushing feeling of loneliness.

In 2022, Meg Lanning was the captain of Australia and making batting look like fine art. She had just led her team to the ODI World Cup and Commonwealth Games titles within six months, while scoring key runs in both tournaments. The gold at the 2022 Commonwealth Games was her seventh such medal with Australia, across both white-ball formats.

And yet, as Lanning posed for pictures with that gold medal, breathing an air of champagne and confetti, her smile was a mask. Concealed from the camaraderie of a vibrant and successful dressing room, something was changing within her.

“Touring is quite lonely. My head was spinning in all kinds of directions, including some not so good ones,” she told Mark Howard in a recent podcast. “I just got to a point where I couldn’t think clearly anymore. Cricket was a distraction.”

She took a small break and began working at a coffee shop. By the next year, her diet and exercise were, in her words, “out of whack”. She was running 85-90 kilometres every week, and eating as much as a squirrel.

“It became a bit of an obsession. It was because I could escape mentally. I would throw the headphones in, I wouldn't take my phone with me. I would have my Apple watch with me and listen to music. Nobody could contact me. It sort of just spiralled and I was in denial. I got down to 57kg from 64kg. But it was the other things that I did not realise. It [affected] my ability to concentrate. I didn't really want to see other people. I disengaged a lot from friends and family. I didn't realise that I was doing this. It sort of became a new normal.”

In the busy-work of that coffee shop, Lanning found solace. It was the ordinariness - what Lanning calls “the real world” - that offered her an escape from the suffocating glare of elite sport.

Professional sport doesn’t come easy even to the prodigiously gifted, like Lanning or Trescothick. Athletes have to chase an invisible bar all their lives, and spend their childhood and formative years in the draining cycle of wake, train, eat, and sleep. And when they reach the top of their sport, they find a militarised environment, where everyone must follow a line.

A top athlete is a public performer. Not only does she have to read her lines perfectly, but in case she fumbles, she has to come back the next day and execute it with mechanical precision. And at all points, even when she is at her lowest, she must maintain the highest level of poise. Straying from this line is directly attributed to mental fragility, of being ill-equipped to handle the scale and fame of top-level sport.

Paddy Upton has worked as a mental conditioning coach for nearly thirty years, including a long stint with a World Cup-winning cricket team. He begins the fourteenth chapter of his book, The Barefoot Coach, with a direct challenge to conventional narrative. “Mental toughness is the most overused and least understood term in sports psychology,” he says.

Upton likens mental toughness to a comic book superhero - someone we all know of and read about, but is ultimately a fictional entity. In that chapter, he speaks about how, over thirty published academic papers on mental toughness, it was difficult to find a consensus on the definition. When broken into subcomponents, mental toughness becomes a kaleidoscope of vague concepts that serve our lazy definitions but have little to do with how elite athletes actually operate.

Cristina Baldasarre is a Swiss sports psychologist, who works with top international athletes across sports. In an interview with DW, she speaks about the fragile headspace so many athletes find themselves in.

“When they come to me, they cry a lot. Often, they don’t know how to deal with the pressure in training and competition. Some cancel their competitions or stop going to training. They don’t have any motivation anymore, feel tired, and no longer trust themselves to do anything.”

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In these moments of vulnerability, social media often plays the role of merciless antagonist. South African cricket writer Firdose Moonda, in a penetrating essay on social media’s impact on cricketers’ mental health, unearths disturbing trends. A study commissioned by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) revealed that up to one-third of posts now containing negative content are targeted towards athletes.

Firdose speaks to Steven Finn, ex-England fast bowler, about the whiplash effect of this online abuse. Finn tells her, “The most dangerous thing about it is that it builds people up to be the best thing in the world or the worst thing in the world. There's no in-between, which is something I struggled with.”

In 2011, Tom Cleverley was living the dream footballer’s life. After spending eleven years at the Manchester United academy, he had finally graduated to the first team. Days before turning 22, he played a key part in a Community Shield-winning performance at Wembley against rivals Manchester City. It was supposed to be the prelude to a long stint in the red shirt, under the gleaming Old Trafford lights.

The dream soon curdled. Recurring injuries and dips in form saw him go from a starlet to a squad option, used for making up the numbers and playing the Tuesday night cup game against a team from two leagues below.

By February 2014, the online mob had turned. A petition calling for Cleverley's sale circulated among United fans, accompanied by a torrent of abuse on his social media accounts. At just 24, an age when most midfielders yet to reach their prime, Cleverley found himself in the crosshairs of fan frustration.

“When I first started getting singled out, it stung, yeah,” he confessed to the press. “I would like the fans on my side and it hurts a little bit when you have grown up at the club and love the club every bit as much as the supporters.”

A few weeks later, Cleverley deleted all his social media accounts. By the following year, he left Manchester United.

Online abuse rarely stops at performance. In fact, it rarely bothers with performance. It goes personal, beginning with telling someone that they’re frauds stealing a living at the upper echelons of society, and seamlessly flowing into discriminatory remarks. A FIFA report from the 2022 World Cup reveals that nearly 18% of the abuse directed at participants was racist in nature.

FIFA, football’s governing body, and FIFPRO, the organisation representing 65,000 professional footballers, have taken decisive steps to tackle online abuse. During the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, they armed the players with a software that would filter out abuse from their social media timelines and mentions.

Over the last few years, FIFPRO have also run a mental health awareness project across football. Mental health coaches are still not mandated inclusions in a coaching staff, but many professional teams at the highest level employ one, or even a team of psychologists.

Lucia Ondrusova, ex-midfielder for the Slovakia women’s team, speaks about the transformative power of having access to mental health resources. “I wasn’t used to interacting in this way, so I had no idea what to expect, but as soon as I opened my mouth and started to talk, I already felt a huge weight lift from my shoulders. I had just taken the first step to open communication with my team and it felt amazing, even more so when we starting to work on our issues together.”

In the autumn of 2023, Brazilian striker Richarlison, then with Tottenham Hotspur, found himself teetering on the brink. “I'd just played in a World Cup, at my peak,” he confided to ESPN Brasil. “I was reaching my limit, you know? I don't know, I'm not going to talk about killing myself, but I was in a depression there, and I wanted to give up.”

Richarlison sought therapy, a decision he credits with saving his life. “If you need a psychologist, look for one because it's nice for you to open up like that, for you to be talking to the person,” he advises.

His Tottenham coach Ange Postecoglou offered public support, praising Richarlison's bravery in speaking out. “It's a credit to him,” Postecoglou said. “He could have dealt with this privately, I think the public aspect of it is a brave decision for him, but more importantly it's a great conduit to others to reach out and seek help when it's required.”

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The sporting world is slowly awakening to these silent struggles. At the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) set up a 24/7 helpline for athletes, offering mental health counselling in over 70 languages. At the 2024 Paris Olympics, the IOC supplemented that with a dedicated mental health zone at the Olympic Village, called the Athlete365 Mind Zone. Alongside a team of therapists, the zone had rooms for meditation, sleep, yoga, and art.

Cricket has taken slower steps than other sports. The sport faces a unique challenge in its governance structure. Unlike FIFA or the IOC, the International Cricket Council is not truly independent, remaining heavily influenced by its most powerful member nations. Its chairman, typically a representative from one of the top countries, often prioritises issues that serve the interests of the few rather than the many.

The ICC have a run a handful of campaigns, maybe a couple of advertisements, but nothing more of note. Their actions have largely been ornamental. There are no mandates, no global regulations compelling teams to implement mental health programs. In this vacuum, a few forward-thinking cricket boards have taken matters into their own hands.

The Australian Cricketers Association, for instance, offers a 24/7 mental health helpline, promising confidentiality and comprehensive support. When Meg Lanning found herself struggling, Cricket Australia stepped up, making a public declaration of unwavering support as she navigated her personal nadir.

The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) has charted a similar course, providing their teams direct access to a team of psychologists. Since Trescothick’s era and even before, they've maintained a tradition of integrating dedicated mental conditioning professionals into their coaching staff.

India has lagged behind, to little surprise. The conversation around mental health in the subcontinent is yet to shed its stigma and achieve normalcy. Until 2017, attempting suicide was a punishable offence under Indian criminal law - a stark indicator of societal attitudes. A 2018 parliamentary document revealed a shocking statistic: India had fewer than 4,000 psychiatrists when the need was for more than 10,000.

The Indian Women’s team had been asking their board for a dedicated sports psychologist since 2016. That request remains unfulfilled. This summer, during their preparation for the 2024 Women’s T20 World Cup, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) arranged for a sports psychologist to conduct a few sessions, as if they were doing the team a favour.

There is, thankfully, some momentum at the grassroots level. In 2019, Rahul Dravid, serving as the Head of Cricket at the National Cricket Academy and coach of India's developmental teams, recognised that mental health support can’t be a luxury reserved only for those with 10,000 Test runs. Dravid believed that support had to be woven into the fabric of the sport at every level.

In an interview with Cricinfo, he was keen to address the problem: “It is a big challenge. This is a tough game. There is so much competition, a lot of pressure, and kids are playing all year round now. It is a game in which you do sometimes spend a lot of time waiting around, having a lot of time to think. So, you really need to look after yourself on and off the field, and look after stuff like mental health.”

Yet, in many corners of the world, “depression” remains a whispered word, spoken with averted eyes. Despite mounting evidence of its prevalence among the general population—let alone those performing at the highest levels of sport under intense scrutiny—we still treat it as an uncomfortable aberration, best mentioned and discussed behind closed doors.

Tottenham Hotspur coach Ange Postecoglou, while addressing Richarlison’s situation, offered a poignant reminder of our shared fragility. “Everyone in this room has something in their lives that is not going well. It could be work, finances, family, health, anything. And footballers face it too. Just because they earn a certain amount doesn't make them immune from feeling life slip from under their feet.”

The onus of normalising the discourse about mental health shouldn’t fall on people like Postecoglou or Dravid. And yet, it does. They are influential voices drawing attention to a key topic, but they are also lifting weights that their sports, and public education, ideally should.

In 2001, as Graham Thorpe’s first marriage was crumbling, he had to leave cricket for six months. No one around him knew the force of the turbulence he was flying into, or the way it would tear him apart. At the time, Thorpe did not know that depression and anxiety are medical issues that can be solved with the right care and attention.

Twenty-three years later, you will find many in every locker room who struggle with similar demons.

The day sport fills that gap, the day it stops thinking of depression and anxiety as signs of mental fragility, we’d know that the stigma has been beaten and our athletes can have their mental health treated with as much care as their cruciate ligaments.

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Acknowledgement

I am indebted to Prem Panicker, whose editorial hand helped steer this piece from concept to completion. His guidance and feedback made this a sharper, more focused work than it would have been otherwise.

You can find Prem on Substack here (you absolutely must subscribe), and on Twitter here.

1. This stat is taken from David Firth’s book, Silence of the Heart. If the topic interests you even a little, it is one of the best and most deeply-researched books you will read.

2. Billy Bates was the first Englishman to take a Test hat-trick. After damaging his cheekbone at a practice session in 1887, he fell into a bout of depression, convinced that his livelihood was ruined. A few months later, he tried to commit suicide.