Marcus Trescothick
Is it just me or does everyone wonder about the scrutiny we place on our young athletes?
The tabloid press is salivating this morning, over an apparent nervous break down by a talented cricketer.
MARCUS Trescothick is a good-natured young man and a very good cricketer. It’s been announced this morning that he will return home to England and take no further part in the ashes series. He apparently has a stress related illness.
According to an article in today’s Sydney Morning Herald, Peter Roebuck wrote that Marcus Trescothick is a cricket mastermind, who just wants to play the game and hates every trapping international cricket has to offer. He hates the public exposure, the travel, the fame, the headlines. He just wants to be left alone with his family.
Peter Roebuck reports that when Marcus arrived at Somerset cricket club in the early 1990s, he brought along with him a cricket coffin that contained not bats and gloves but several hundred chocolate bars. Officials at the club were perplexed, wondering what they should do about the chocolate overload…
It turned out, Marcus’s parents had never made him eat fruit or vegetables, he’d basically grown up on chocolate and he knew in his heart that if that wasn’t allowed to continue, if he was expected to not only live away from home, but change his diet in line with what the trainers wanted, there was no way he could cope and his cricket career could not continue. So the chocolate bars remained.
15 years later that story takes on more significance. Here is a man who wants to surround himself with the familiar.
Trescothick has the full support of the English cricket team. The full support of his family and he deserves our respect too.
A fragile mental state is difficult to understand to the outsider and sometimes very frustrating to watch – I can hear the English press now! “..what’s wrong with him? England needs him for the ashes! Tell him to snap out of it…”
But life is not that simple. And it’s people like Marcus Trescothick that remind us to take care with others. To play nicely. Because some things are more important than cricket…
The tabloid press is salivating this morning, over an apparent nervous break down by a talented cricketer.
MARCUS Trescothick is a good-natured young man and a very good cricketer. It’s been announced this morning that he will return home to England and take no further part in the ashes series. He apparently has a stress related illness.
According to an article in today’s Sydney Morning Herald, Peter Roebuck wrote that Marcus Trescothick is a cricket mastermind, who just wants to play the game and hates every trapping international cricket has to offer. He hates the public exposure, the travel, the fame, the headlines. He just wants to be left alone with his family.
Peter Roebuck reports that when Marcus arrived at Somerset cricket club in the early 1990s, he brought along with him a cricket coffin that contained not bats and gloves but several hundred chocolate bars. Officials at the club were perplexed, wondering what they should do about the chocolate overload…
It turned out, Marcus’s parents had never made him eat fruit or vegetables, he’d basically grown up on chocolate and he knew in his heart that if that wasn’t allowed to continue, if he was expected to not only live away from home, but change his diet in line with what the trainers wanted, there was no way he could cope and his cricket career could not continue. So the chocolate bars remained.
15 years later that story takes on more significance. Here is a man who wants to surround himself with the familiar.
Trescothick has the full support of the English cricket team. The full support of his family and he deserves our respect too.
A fragile mental state is difficult to understand to the outsider and sometimes very frustrating to watch – I can hear the English press now! “..what’s wrong with him? England needs him for the ashes! Tell him to snap out of it…”
But life is not that simple. And it’s people like Marcus Trescothick that remind us to take care with others. To play nicely. Because some things are more important than cricket…
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