Jonathan Trott going home

[amer]

What a miserable sack effort from Trott.

Justin Langer would not want him in the trenches.

 

[peternorth]

Not really.

If the assumption was that he had depression, he should have been left alone.

It's not like these guys had some a priori knowledge that he didn't have depression. More likely, they thought he was fair game anyway, which is still wrong, even if it turns out Trott didn't have depression and simply couldn't hack it.

why is it wrong if the sledger didnt know about him potentially having depression?

 

[ManWithNoName]

why is it wrong if the sledger didnt know about him potentially having depression?

I assume he was talking about people posting here.

 

[Wayne Arnold]

What a miserable sack effort from Trott.

Justin Langer would not want him in the trenches.

I doubt he'd notice who else was in the trenches, as his head would be fully inserted up Ricky Ponting's arse.

 

[HBF]

Great article by Vaughan, was spot on especially what he said about Trott's pathetic "nut case" comments. Made Trott sound like he had no idea about depression. As Vaughan said, twice Trott has abandoned and both times against the best pace attacks.

Cannot see him playing for England again. Should at least persist with the batsmen that at least lasted the entire Aussie tour.

 

[Ian Dargie]

why is it wrong if the sledger didnt know about him potentially having depression?

I'm talking about people who bagged him after he left the tour – with what was believed at the time to be depression.

 

[Doodlesweaver]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/cr...-Trott-to-return-to-international-set-up.html

Soup gets thicker. The selectors are trying to share responsibility by the sounds of it. There aren't many senior players left.

Why don't they just make him play county for a year? I realise they need all the batsmen they can get just now, but why bother with the risk involved in rushing him back?

 

[The_Reaper]

Pretty piss weak by the selectors to publicise this.

 

[Doodlesweaver]

Pretty piss weak by the selectors to publicise this.

The ECB press relations dept's decision-making abilities appear to have gone down the toilet. Trott's agent doesn't sound any better..

I wonder if the 'senior' players - whoever they are meant to be apart from Cook- were asked if they wanted to play with KP anymore?

 

[The Passenger]

Can someone point me to the interview where he has used the wods "nut case" and "crazy"

Not saying he didn't do it (given plenty of people are saying that he did) - I genuinely can't find the article/interview.

Really poor form from the guy

 

[ManWithNoName]

Can someone point me to the interview where he has used the wods "nut case" and "crazy"

Not saying he didn't do it (given plenty of people are saying that he did) - I genuinely can't find the article/interview.

Really poor form from the guy

It was on Sky.

 

[King Elvis]

I doubt he'd notice who else was in the trenches, as his head would be fully inserted up Ricky Ponting's arse.

Least he wasn't a soft ****.

 

[Ian Dargie]

From Trott: "I wasn’t able to carry myself in a way... Throughout the summer I was getting to 40 and 50 and I just couldn’t watch the ball as hard as I normally do, it just wasn’t there for some reason, whether I was thinking too much about cricket off the field and just burning myself out that way or just trying too hard."

Essentially: 'I was struggling so I bailed.'

What does Trott think you sign on for when you represent England in an Ashes series?

Some of England's critics seized on their crazy food demands as a sign that these players had become so accustomed to having their arses wiped for them that their competitive intelligence had suffered: they'd lost the ability to figure out how to get out of tight spots without having solutions spoonfed to them. I thought that was drawing a long bow but Trott's account of his own decision to quit a major tour - because he was "trying too hard" - suggests that may indeed be the case.

Look at this guy abbrogating responsiblity for his lack of runs. It's not that he got worked over or wasn't up to it. Rather, it was the result of a situation that happened to him.

The English players who stuck around and had their noses rubbed in it by Australia have every right to be dirty with Trott. It got hard, so he bolted. What happens next time they're in a similar position?

I wonder if Michael Clarke felt "burnt out" while scoring a century against the No.1 side despite batting with a broken shoulder. It's funny, I don't ever recall him failing because he was "trying too hard" either.

 

[Joffaboy]

Really piss weak and pathetic by Trott.

Remember back to the Poms whinging about the Aussies being so jolly nasty to them in the first test, and then continued this BS meme by insinuating Trott was heading home because of "stress".

Weaving into the crap was the bullying of Warner who,as it now turns out, was completely spot on.

Test cricket is called TEST for a reason. Compare Trott who runs away when the going gets tough to Clarke, scores 161 n.o after having his shoulder fractured, cracked on the head and forearm and having his thumb smashed. Couldn't sleep the night this happen, came out and scored another 70 runs.

Or compare it to Harris who could hardly walk and pulls out al stops to win the third test. Now out for six months.

Compare to Johnson who was barracked incessently by the Lobster Army, and what does he do this summer?

Trott has a flawed character. Flag of convienence player, who squibbs it when the going gets tough, now want to play against Sri Lanka and India because that is easier than Aust or SA.

Really a pathetic attitude, a slimy con artist that uses mental illness for an excuse for being weak and a flat track bully.

Absolutely no respect for this type of low character.

 

[Freo Big Fella]

Glad to see he's selflessly volunteered to return against Scotland.

Not only has he seriously made a mockery of people battling legitimate mental illnesses, he's made it incredibly difficult for other international cricketers who may be struggling in the future.

 

[Doodlesweaver]

I've just been looking over Trott's stats and they aren't exactly that impressive in the past 3 years. 2011 - averaged 40.5, 2012 - averaged 38.6, 2013 - 37.7 so he's a good but not outstanding player who had a fantastic start to his career.

He might come back and average wtfever he did for his first 20 games, but it's highly unlikely as the above sounds like he's been worked out. Be riidiculous if he thinks his form is purely down to his 'burnout'.

 

[amer]

Least he wasn't a soft ****.

Exactly. Be hard to do better than buddy up with the punter. One of the hardest ****s to play the game. God I love him.

 

[Adelaide Hawk]

Really piss weak and pathetic by Trott.

Test cricket is called TEST for a reason. Compare Trott who runs away when the going gets tough to Clarke, scores 161 n.o after having his shoulder fractured, cracked on the head and forearm and having his thumb smashed. Couldn't sleep the night this happen, came out and scored another 70 runs.

Ian Chappell has always said that a weakness in character is no different to a weakness in batting technique. It is there to be exploited, and when you walk onto the Test arena, you leave yourself open to that exploitation. As you said, it's why they call it "TEST" cricket. Test is always spelt with a capital T.

 

[peternorth]

have fleet street started identifying trott as south african?

 

[Dipper]

Agreed.

It's one thing to expect people to show some sensitivity around the issue of clinical depression, which, as we were told, isn't about 'not being tough enough' but about a chemical imbalance that can be seriously destabilising. And I reckon that's fair enough.

But it seems that wasn't the issue with Trott. He seems to essentially be saying that the demands and the pressure of playing international cricket took a toll and he couldn't handle it, while distancing himself from the kind of depression that we were told he had and told to tread delicately around. Vaughan says he "feels conned". That's one way of putting it. The upshot is that Trott is fair game as a result.

As Vaughan says: "There is a danger we are starting to use stress-related illness and depression too quickly as tags for players under pressure."

Also: "As a player there were many times I went back to my hotel room at night and broke down because I did not know where my next run was going to come from. I thought I was suffering from depression but I was just out of form."

Let me stress, if Trott actually had depression, then he should be left alone and looked after while he recovers. But if he doesn't have depression - and is belittling the suggestion by insisting he's "not crazy" - then that no longer applies and we should go at him like a pack of spider monkeys.

I should probably preface my reply by stating that I'm an England fan but have always felt that Trott probably isn't a very nice fellow and not somebody that engenders much in the way of empathy from me.

I find it interesting that firstly when the ECB use this term 'stress related condition, which I think they did for Trescothick also, that these days people are largely sympathetic and the reason is that they assume that it's depression that's being alluded to.

It seems from what Trott has said, and also from reading a Trescothick interview, that what they've both suffered from are more anxiety conditions, for sure there can be some overlap between the two and there's always somewhat of a grey area when labeling a mental condition and sometimes people are spoken of as being on the spectrum of a labeled illness.

So when people it's depression there's a lot of sympathy but when it becomes apparent that it's an anxiety condition then all the sympathy evaporates.

My view is that in life when someone just can't cope anymore, whatever job they're doing, or even if they don't have a job for that matter, it's a pretty shit state of affairs and it doesn't really matter what the diagnosis is. In normal circumstances you would try to take them out of the firing line and in the early stages this can be enough for people to recover with a bit of time and space, easier done in a normal job (although for most people the financial pressures are greater and there's always that fear of being given the bullet).

I don't know enough about Trott's situation to know exactly what he's experienced but when Michael Vaughan says that there were times that he went back to his hotel and broke down, if he's experiencing that now and again, it's probably just feeling the pressure a bit, but there's a point where if you're getting in that state fairly often then you have an illness. When he says at first he thought he was suffering depression he's showing his ignorance that the only mental breakdown condition around is depression, people can feel totally burnt out by life, unable to function, paralysed and full of worry and yet it doesn't make it clinical depression.

Michael Vaughan has unfortunately put himself up over here as a bit of a rent-a-quote character who's ridiculously quick to put forward an opinion on anything whether he knows anything about it or not,especially through that pathetic forum that is twitter (note his badgering of Graeme Swann as if Swann owed him personally an explanation ).

I think Trott is like a lot of people in that he's concerned about being labelled as a depressive, and he's come out with these comments to dispel that idea. Somebody posted on here a link to an article by Martin Crowe which was pretty interesting and I think he said something like Trott is a lot further away and has more work to do get himself to a place where he can function without this stuff returning than he knows and I think he's probably right, Trott is trying to talk his way back into the England side but he may never be able to manage that. Trescothick couldn't do it despite continuing to do well at county level.

Once you've reached a point of becoming overcome by the pressure of your situation it will remain a weak point until you've done some serious work to alleviate the underlying causes, and there's no drugs that are going to 'cure' you.

It's clearly a far more extreme situation but with stuff like this I always think of the First World War troops that suffered with shell shock, these weren't people that were all suffering from depression beforehand, instead they were put into a situation where their nervous systems as much as anything couldn't cope with the extreme nature of the environment with which they found themselves, and this is completely understandable, and they weren't able to withdraw from that situation. What they've experienced is an extreme stress response that has made them barely able to function, although for whatever reason not everybody gets to this point, and I think in a much less extreme situation this is similar to what happens to people when they're overcome by the stress of the situation that they find themselves in, it's not depression but it's a significant illness that causes huge impairment to their everyday ability to function. And I don't think that's any less worthy of sympathy than clinical depression, which seems to be the vibe that is coming across in numerous newspaper articles over here.


I'm not having a go at you personally or even your views, but it's more that you quoted Michael Vaughan but it is interesting that if Trott is diagnosed with depression then you think he deserves sympathy but if not then we should go at him like a pack of spider monkeys, but surely it's not as black and white as somebody is suffering from depression or isn't when dealing with mental problems......there's a massive grey area and all any diagnosis can do is help to give some direction in regards to treatment.

 

[Dipper]

The funny thing is that Trott seems to think he's entitled to walk back into the England side.

Setting aside the nature of his breakdown, isn't it reasonable for selectors to simply say: "Maybe international cricket isn't for you?"

Whatever the specifics, the guy has problems dealing with the demands of playing at that level. OK, so stick to playing at county level. There's no great shame in that. Why does he even want to play for England if it makes him feel like shit?

I'm reminded of when Andrew Symonds went off the rails and was discarded. That manifested itself differently – Symonds decided to get drunk every second day. But the root cause is similar i.e. a player was no longer willing/able to deal with the demands of international cricket and it warped his whole attitude and approach to playing. The difference is that England tried to protect their man by cloaking his exit in the veil of a 'stress-related illness'. Symonds, in many ways, also had a breakdown that was stress-related but, instead, Australia simply said: 'Bugger off. It's good enough for the 14 other guys in the squad and 20 guys outside it who want your spot, so you're finished.'

I just saw this post, I'd missed it before, in some ways this was what I was alluding to.

I pretty much agree with what you're saying.

I think it's pretty insightful what you say about Symonds, essentially he was probably experiencing some kind of breakdown, but when it's heavy drinking combined with bad behaviour people have a lot less sympathy......until of course they're diagnosed as being an alcoholic then the sympathy starts.

 

[Ian Dargie]

Really piss weak and pathetic by Trott.

Remember back to the Poms whinging about the Aussies being so jolly nasty to them in the first test, and then continued this BS meme by insinuating Trott was heading home because of "stress".

Back in the day, I also remember certain sections of the Australian press lambasting the team – and Ricky Ponting – for being 'too nasty'.

Now we know what it feels like to lose. And to come back from that and win, playing Australian cricket.

Beware those who sow weakness and call it something else.

 

[Ian Dargie]

I think it's pretty insightful what you say about Symonds, essentially he was probably experiencing some kind of breakdown, but when it's heavy drinking combined with bad behaviour people have a lot less sympathy......until of course they're diagnosed as being an alcoholic then the sympathy starts.

And Symonds was banished without a second thought. Because booze was involved, he was the engineer of his own demise.

But in Trott's case, management called it something else. So he was a victim of circumstance.

Identify bullshit and burn it where you find it.

 

[Ian Dargie]

I'm not having a go at you personally or even your views, but it's more that you quoted Michael Vaughan but it is interesting that if Trott is diagnosed with depression then you think he deserves sympathy but if not then we should go at him like a pack of spider monkeys, but surely it's not as black and white as somebody is suffering from depression or isn't when dealing with mental problems......there's a massive grey area and all any diagnosis can do is help to give some direction in regards to treatment.

The point is that if someone has clinical depression, that is about a chemical imbalance.

If someone just cracks under the pressure of playing Test cricket, then they're fair game. Sport is meant to test people that way. If someone fails, you don't just call it something else and pretend it never happened.

What about Daryll Cullinan? Did he have 'a breakdown' when facing Shane Warne? Was his lack of runs 'stress-related'? Or did he just come up short at the highest level?

Trott failed. He went missing when it mattered. Bad luck. Some guys train for four years and then get disqualified for false starts in the 100m final at the Olympics. Suck it up. That's professional sport. Sometimes it is brutal. You don't get a do-over just because you plead 'mental fragility'.

At the very least, Trott doesn't get to walk away from an Ashes series and then ask for his spot back. Maybe Trott shouldn't be playing Test cricket. That's not a sledge. But maybe he simply isn't constituted that way. Don't ask people to make excuses for that.

 

[Dipper]

The point is that if someone has clinical depression, that is about a chemical imbalance.

Well I think there's a fair bit of conjecture on that....my view if it was simply a chemical imbalance then making good that chemical imbalance would sort everyone out but that's clearly not the case.

Do a brain scan of someone suffering from severe chronic stress and you'll see a completely different picture than that of a 'normal' relaxed, well adjusted individual......I daresay that you'll find that they have differences in their seretonin levels too.