Let us talk about mind games

Rohit Mahajan

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THE dread of failure, the fear of the end, the certainty of mortality. We feel all this. But does, say, Virat Kohli, feel it too? He says he does. Indeed, he perhaps feels this at much more extreme levels than us, because he operates at more extreme levels of the reward-punishment system that governs success or failure in life.

Australia’s Glenn Maxwell — grin-faced millionaire, swashbuckling World Cup winner — suffers from anxiety too. The good thing is that he lives in times when talking about it is not considered shameful.

Twelve years ago, Shaun Tait, the fearsome Aussie fast bowler, couldn’t take it anymore. He’d been brought back into the team for the Perth Test against India in January 2008. The pitch was bouncy. He possessed extreme speed. The Australian team was seething because it had been criticised for its ‘over-aggressive’ behaviour in the previous Test in Sydney. Tait was going to destroy Indian batting. Expectations were high. But Tait failed — he conceded expensive runs, went wicketless, and India won. Tait stepped away from the game, and never played Test cricket again.

Tait says he “copped up a fair bit” for taking a break from cricket — he was criticised for being a sissy, for not being tough enough. “It wasn’t like it is now,” he says.

Then and now

“Now” is different — when Maxwell, Nic Maddinson and Will Pucovski took a break over mental health issues, the overwhelming reaction was sympathy, not derision.

A cricketer is regarded as especially susceptible to mental health problems largely because there’s greater possibility of over-thinking in this sport. A batsman might spend hours, even days, waiting for his turn, fretting over what fate might have in store for him — perhaps an unplayable first ball would make him look like a fool?

Statistics may not be easily available or accurate, but it has been postulated that cricketers are more susceptible to depression and self-harm that the general populace or those who compete in other sports.

David Frith, who has done seminal work on suicides in cricket and written two books on the issue, believes that cricket has a higher rate of “self-destruction” because “the long days of dedication which cricket demands by its often punishing format can wear a man down”.

Frith does admit, though, cricket was not the immediate reason for suicide in most of the cases he wrote about, and that “the great majority were beset by deteriorating health, acute financial anxiety, helpless addiction to the bottle, marriage or sexual problems, or a kind of intrinsic instability, even madness, innocently induced by chemical changes in the brain or in some cases the hideous experience of front-line warfare”.

Most of the cases in Frith’s books on suicide are, he noted, “white Anglo-Saxons”. But India isn’t immune to the phenomenon. VB Chandrasekhar, a seven-ODI player for India, committed suicide this year. India had a particularly bad year in 2007, when four cricketers committed suicide — domestic players Rambabu Pal and Manish Mishra, one-time India U-17 captain Subhash Dixit, and Jhuma Sarkar, a former Bengal Under-19 women’s team member.

It’s not cricket itself that pushes cricketers over the edge — it’s an aggregation of the troubles of life, including failure or anxiety in cricket. But cricket must do something to help cricketers who are suffering, beginning by first acknowledging the problem.

Aussie sporting culture

Cricket’s depression/mental health problem isn’t unexplored, of course — recent weeks have merely highlighted the case of the suffering Australians. It’s a sign of the more sensitive times that we live in now that Maxwell, Maddinson and Pucovski received support that Tait didn’t merely 12 years ago. This signifies a change in the Australian attitude towards frailty in sport — traditionally, Australians have had extreme contempt for sporting frailty.

A survey last year showed that Australian men aged 18 to 30 hold traditional ideas of masculinity — including toughness, rigid gender roles, homophobia, aggression and control over women, and race-insensitivity. Australian boys are brought up masculine-driven, a somewhat less-genteel and somewhat abrasive society. Bullying is a part of life — you take and give it back, harder. The culture is tough and blunt. Kids internalise it, taking it to the sports arena.

The Ponting story

Ricky Ponting gave an insight into aspects that made him tough: One was growing up in modest circumstances in the working-class part of Launceston, Tasmania; the other was playing with men twice his age. Ponting was a kid genius when barely as tall as the stumps. He was always playing with much older men. The rule of the men was that if a boy was good enough to play club cricket with them, he was good enough to be treated like a man.

At 12, Ponting was playing with the men. “I was sledged more in my first season with Mowbray than I would ever be sledged again in my life,” he wrote in his autobiography. One memorable round of verbal warfare occurred after he “made the mistake of responding to something the other team’s wicketkeeper had muttered from behind the stumps”. Ponting’s father was in the team as well. He jumped right into the battle. “If I had been out of line, Dad would have said so. Instead, he got into this keeper and the language was pretty full-on,” Ponting wrote. So, a pre-teen Ponting got into a foul-mouthed exchange with a man twice his age, and Ponting’s father jumped right into it — not with admonishment but with more fire and foul words. This confirmed to Ponting that he was not “out of line”.

Australians are genuinely friendly people — it’s just that when they put their game-face on, sport and victory become a matter of life and death. It’s because, right from the memorable 1882 win over “motherland’ England, which gave birth to the Ashes trophy, sport has been the biggest source of pride and self-affirmation for Australians.

Australia’s intense sporting culture does put players under immense pressure — indeed, as respected writer Gideon Haigh observes, even the greatest of them all, Don Bradman, felt the pressure — it’s just that the mental health vocabulary was “paltry” at the time. Bradman missed the first Test of the ‘Bodyline’ series against England in 1932 — Haigh notes that the official line was that Bradman was “organically sound” but “run down”. That sounds like a mental health issue. It’s just that, in those tough years during the Great Depression and between the Great Wars, when serious existential issues troubled the world, stress arising from playing sport could just not be appreciated. There were no words for it.

Changing perceptions

As Tait notes, and as the reaction to Maxwell’s travails reveals, attitudes are undergoing rapid change. Introspection started in 2008, after Peter Roebuck called Ricky Ponting’s team a “pack of dogs” for their behaviour during the Sydney Test.

Five years ago, a horrible tragedy occurred — Phil Hughes died after being struck by the ball on the back of his head during a domestic match. Cricket had been treated as a life and death matter — but an actual death on the field was a rude shock that made people wonder if sport was that important, after all.

Last year’s “Sandpapergate” scandal, which led to a ban on captain Steve Smith and his deputy David Warner, caused more consternation. A Cricket Australia cultural review found that the board was arrogant and dictatorial, and pushed a culture of “wining at all costs”.

These two events have caused confusion and introspection among the players.

Dr Peter English, cricket writer and academic, says the Hughes tragedy has played and replayed at the back of the cricketers’ minds. “In the past five years it has been a constant theme in the background,” says English. “Cricket was never life and death before, even though it was treated seriously. So that tragedy may contribute to their view on life and the game, even if it is not directly related to the mental health of Maxwell, Maddinson or Pucovski.”

Australia is becoming kinder to players who may suffer on the field. “I think that on-field behaviour is still regarded as involving separate rules of engagement — Australian attitudes in that respect have not changed so much,” Haigh says. “Where appreciation has changed is in the realm of player welfare, the loneliness and isolation inherent in the professional system.”

The society is changing, and the change is reflecting in sport. “The society is becoming less silent, less rigid, less mindlessly stoical,” says Haigh. “And sport is at the forefront of this, because it is still the place where Australians most frequently and fruitfully come together. Your average sporting club is a lot more inclusive and tolerant of difference than it used to be.”

That’s good — it’s sad Tait didn’t get the love he needed, but it’s wonderful that Maxwell is getting it.