Just finished reading Jonathan Trott's autobiography, Unguarded. This post is partially a review of the book but more my recollections of Trotty, most of which come from first class not international cricket, appropriate given Trott played 281 1st class matches of which 52 were tests.
So when did I first see Jonathan Trott? I think it must have been Chelmsford in 2003, right at the end of his first full season with Warwickshire. The cricket world wasn't that different then compared to now, the two division county championship and 20/20 were both up and running. What do I remember about him? There was quite a lot of hair and his driving down the ground was impressive, the ball leapt off his bat faster than it should. I had him marked down as talented but impermanent.
It was an impression reinforced when I saw him at Lord's the following June. The 2004 Warwickshire side were a tough team to play, they didn't lose a game in the county championship that season. They only won 5 games but with points for a draw and batting points took them to The Championship. To recognise their achievement the ECB changed the rules, reducing the points for a draw, think about that the next time you see England bowled out in less than 50 overs. But to me Trotty didn't seem to fit into that side. At Lord's he was fielding in front of the mound stand; a friend of his came down into the front row and the two of them had quite a chat in between balls. The impression I got was of two South Africans enjoying their time in Europe, one was working in a bar, the other had a gig playing cricket. His record that year seemed to support me, past 50, 11 times, 1 hundred. Talented but not fully engaged.
I couldn't have been more wrong. In his autobiography Trott acknowledges that even aged 8 he saw himself as a cricketer before anything else and sporting success as central to both his self - worth and his family's happiness. There's a line in the sit com, Frasier, he and Niles are having a conversation about Frasier's failed marriage and Frasier anxious to have a real talk makes Niles put his psychiatrists note pad in a drawer. After one exchange Niles says: ""Sort of" is another one of those phrases that just wants to go in my pad." It's a line I thought of every time Ma Trott turns up in Jonathan's autobiography, she positively haunts the text. Equally haunting is Trott's summation "You have to be a bit of a mess to want it as badly as you need to if you're going to make it."
Trott's move to Warwickshire wasn't some sort of South African post university jolly. He'd been a successful school boy cricketer in South Africa, played some games for South Africa under 19s and first class cricket for two provinces, Boland and Western Province. But if Trott was good he wasn't outstanding and there's nothing in his U19 or first class record in South Africa to suggest a call up to the international team was imminent. If he stayed in South Africa Trott had the prospect of years of playing in provincial cricket for little more than expenses. Even at 20 utilising his UK passport was a calculated career move. I'd seen a gap year student but the real Trott was ambitious, driven and burdened.
After that Lord's game there seems to be a period with no memories of Trott batting for Warwickshire. Not surprising, I generally saw a day of cricket here and there so it was quite possible to miss his batting. I do have an impression of him becoming more a part of the side, he switched from riding the boundary to fielding in the slips where he was a fine catcher and a vociferous encourager. Edgbaston on county championship days will seem an even emptier place without his South African accented shouts echoing round the empty Hollis.
And for reasons unclear I have a sharp recollection of him bowling against Sussex. I'd guess that was April 2005 a bitterly cold day with the wind slicing across Hove, he was, wind assisted, distinctly sharp. He also bowled quite fast in September of the same year when the sight of Kevin Pietersen in the Cheltenham & Gloucester final enraged / encouraged him to 3 for 35 with the ball in a losing cause.
Looking at the stats he'd sorted out his not getting hundreds problem; 4 in 2005, 3 in 2006 and an average of 41.something both years. He'd become a very good county player, he didn't qualify for England until 2007 and I don't think anyone expected him to go straight into the England side, forty something averages weren't as compelling then as they are now, but he was in the list of possibles.
It was April 2006 when I saw my first great Trott hundred, in April against Yorkshire. Trott was the stand - out batsman in that game along with Yorkshire's Darren Lehman. Lehman's batting was violent; slashes, cuts and clumps. Trott though purred along, the ball was rarely hit rather stroked and tapped but always went fast enough hugging the ground. He was always coming towards the ball. A lot went through the leg side, Trott often gave the impression the bowling was aimed at leg stump and no matter where Yorkshire put the fielders he found a way to miss them. He scored 177 off 260 balls. But there was never a sense of rush. This was batting boiled down to its essentials, the good balls were blocked, for the others Trott had selected, oh I don't know, let's say, 4 scoring shots and every time the ball was in the zone for one of those shots he scored the appropriate amount of runs from it. There was no attempt to raise the pace, sieze the moment. Classic batting, bare of adornment. There was something restful about watching Trotty bat, contrasting with Warwickshire and England team mate Ian Bell. Bell is a beautiful batsman, a summer breeze, but the wi - fi link between his brain and his talent may go down at any time. Sometimes under pressure, but sometimes just because. Bell will bat like a prince for 50 and then become inexplicably becalmed. Shots will hit the fielders, Bell becomes visibly nervous, does something silly and gets out. When Trott was in, he was in, you could just sit back and watch him harvest the bowling.
But 2007, the year, Trott qualified for England, was an unmitigated disaster. As he explains this was, in part, because of an inability to deal with his own expectations , but also a result of the coaching of Mark Greatbatch. The account of the pre -season tour of the West Indies is a classic of Brentian man management (read the book). It was the same Mark Greatbatch who confined Moeen Ali to the Warwickshire 2s. 2007 wasn't the first crisis for Trott, back in South Africa aged 16 his mother had hauled him off to the psychiatrist after he'd put together a run of low scores when he hoped to play his way into the South African Under 19 team.
But now as before the crisis passed and a better Trotty emerged. Mentored by Ashley Giles, Warwickshire's new coach Trott bounced back to average over 60 in division 2 of the county championship in 2008 and stood out on an England A team tour to New Zealand. Ravi Bopara was the first choice for England number 3 at the start of 2009, but as he faltered in the ashes, Trott, after a slow start to the season, began to score heavily. In hindsight it seems inevitable that with the ashes series tied at one all Trott would replace Bopara for the final test. But the national press never really got along with the introverted batsman and there was talk about Marcus Trescothick or Mark Ramprakash playing. Mike Selvey in The Guardian complained that Ashley Giles's dual role as England selector and Warwickshire coach meant he was favouring Trott.
I thought Trott missing out on selection might be a good thing for him, neither Ramprakash nor Trescothick was going to tour South Africa in the winter and it might be preferable to wait rather than play in a massive one off game, fail and have the press on his back.
Needn't have worried. Trott, batting at 5, scored a solid 40 in the first innings and a serene 119 in the second, treating the Australian attack to the same measured going over he had given Yorkshire in 2006. I was there on the Saturday for the hundred. England were on top, over 200 runs in the lead but Australia had taken three quick second innings wickets the night before and were in with a shout. Seeing one of my favourite players score a match sealing hundred, on debut, in a decisive ashes test and on a pitch that had started to act up should be burnt onto my mind's eye, but I have very few memories of it. As so often with Trott watching him bat must have been a calm experience. I do remember the actual hundred well, a perfectly blameless ball turned through the leg side field. It might have ended up going for 4 but Trott was running, the first run took him to hundred and he completed the 2nd with his bat held up like a flag. It was probably the finest moment of what was to be a highly successful test career.
In the period to the end of 2013 he played in 48 tests averaging a tick under 50 a game, generally batting at three. In England's ashes win in Australia in 2010 - 2011 he averaged 63. He was successful in South Asia, often a grave yard for English batsmen and I saw him score a hundred at Galle in Sri Lanka. England had just come off a defeat at the hands of Pakistan and Saeed Ajmal in the UAE and in the first innings had a complete melt down trying to use their feet to Rangana Herath. Trott joined in the disarray, out stumped, the only time he was stumped in test cricket and one of only 4 stumpings suffered in his entire first class career. In the second innings Trott threw out the team plan to be positive and, on a pitch offering sharp turn, and in a wet, enervating Sri Lankan heat (I did my part and can report going for an ice cream was an ordeal) made 112 out of 264. He played the Sri Lankan spinners from the crease, largely off the back foot, which is the way you are supposed to do it. It wasn't enough to win England the game but it did show a shell shocked team it was possible to bat against spin and with Kevin Pietersen playing one of his great innings England won the second test in Colombo where Trott got 60 odd in the first innings. In Unguarded Trott says more than once how much pride he took in going out and scoring runs when his team most needed them and he did that in tough away series.
Whilst Trott was scoring that hundred in Galle, I asked my friend, sat next to me, if he thought Trott was England's best post war batsman? It was a quite stupid question (Dennis Compton, Ken Barrington definitely Geoffrey Boycott, Graham Gooch probably.) But, not that stupid, at the time Trott averaged over 50 and had made his runs against all comers. Of course fate, in the form of Mitchell Johnson, was waiting, twirling his mustachios and pawing at the turf.
I overstated Trott's abilities in part because he was a Warwickshire batsman I'd watched on the way up and also because some people, national press included were anxious to write him down. Their distaste might have been because he was a South African interloper and there can't be any doubt he came to the UK to make money playing cricket. They might just not have liked him and in Unguarded it's made clear Trott, or in any event the young Trott, could come across as brash. But I also suspect some people's dislike of Trott came down to a question of style. The ghost of amateurism continues to haunt English cricket's Psyche, people want and demand professional levels of commitment but in the middle they want it to look easy, graceful, they want Ian Bell even if they can't take the uncertainties of Bell. But Trott's batting didn't give you grace and didn't seem effortful, at its best it hummed along like a machine. That never bothered me, there is aesthetic pleasure in a tool whose form is perfectly adapted for a purpose, machines can be beautiful. Any anyway Trott's batting offered timing, lovely driving if the ball was begging to be driven and the ability to play any ball pitched on or even just off the stumps to any point on the leg side Trott wanted it to go.
But, in the future Mitchell was waiting.
I saw Trott's first test innings on the TV. Shane Warne in the commentary box said that at Hampshire they had generally looked to get Trott LBW. Trott had managed to score 184 runs at the Rose bowl that year without being out LBW or any other way but what the hell, it was a plan. And one that most test teams obligingly followed for the next four years. Funnily enough Paul Allot had some years previously said, on watching Trott in a 20:20 game, "you've got to try him with the short ball."
I won't say much about the 2013 - 2014 ashes as that series is both the start and the centre of Unguarded around which the rest of Trott's career revolves like water going down the plug hole. Trott and his ghost writer George Dobell do a skillful job, you get a real sense of the pressure building on Trott and understand a little of what he went through. At the time there was debate about whether Trott had a "genuine" illness or whether he was reacting to coming up against a bowler he had no answers for. The book makes it clear the distinction is empty, Trott was ill but it was his job as a cricketer that was making him ill. His breakdown (a phrase used in the book) was work related but that didn't somehow mean he should or could have just soldiered on.
And Trott occasionally comes out with a very insightful observation; suggesting Andy Flower's lack of empathy might have been because he too was suffering from the burn out of an overly congested schedule with back to back ashes series. Credit goes to George Dobell Trott's ghost writer for the way the material is arranged providing an insight into what it was in Trott's mentality that both made him "mentally strong" but also vulnerable to stress but always showing rather than telling. The drop ins, where the narrative shifts from Trott's internal state to the observations of Kevin Pietersen, Andy Flower, Alastair Cook and Andy Strauss, work well.
Trott and Dobell do their job so well I did at times feel a pang of guilt. We, the sporting public, create a demand for a product, the young, male, gifted, sportsman. But to be good enough to meet that demand the prospective sportsman needs to start early, maybe not quite as early as Trott started but by what, 15 or 16 years of age we are expecting boys to be playing cricket "professionally" even though they don't get paid for it. Some of them won't make it and for some of them cost of failure is high. Others do succeed and are well rewarded but in our need for them and their success we involve them in all sorts of debates, aesthetic, nationalist, moral. So when they fail, break down we are disappointed, we respond like children who have been let down by their parents although that's the wrong way round. I suppose compared to many of the bad things in the world it's not such a big deal.
There is though one line in the book which made me particularly uneasy where Trott says "What happened in 2013 is part of my story - an important part - but it's not the whole story. I hope people remember the other parts." But what Unguarded does is make 2013 the narrative centre of Trott's autobiography. You can see what Trott, Dobell and publishers Little Brown are about of course, it's the mental struggles which take Unguarded beyond a simple I came, I saw, I batted sports book. But all the evidence is that Trott has had a good life. He grew up with a talent and determination to play cricket which he bartered into a successful career, first at the county and then the international level, where for a time he was one of the world's best batsmen. The drive and hunger that made him successful also made him prone to stress related incidents. He managed to come through these but eventually found playing test cricket incompatible with his health. So he stopped. But when he retired he had (surely) done most of what he set out to achieve as a cricketer, made a decent amount of money, was married, with two children and had acquired enough skills that he should have a decent and interesting future. Unguarded takes one piece of Trott's life and makes it the whole.
And leaving Australia one test into the 2012 - 2013 ashes wasn't the end of Jonathan Trott, it wasn't the end of Trott as a cricketer, or even as an international cricketer. By April of 2014 he was going out to bat against Sussex, he was again troubled by the short ball and didn't play in first class cricket again until the end of June. But once back in the side he did pretty well, got a couple of hundreds in September and in the triumph of hope over expectation was selected for an A team tour of South Africa and then a full tour of the West Indies. I'm pretty sure it's not all hindsight that makes this seem a dumb decision, I thought it was stupid at the time and I think most people did, Trott had broken down in tears in the England dressing room less than a year previously, to come back to international cricket at all was dubious and to come back so soon reckless. But I guess you can understand how the decision was taken. Trott was 33 so if he was going to play more test cricket it probably had to be soon and England had more than half an eye to the ashes of 2015 and what looked like a gap in the team at opener (not many of the players from 2013 are still going but the Trott shaped hole in the England team remains.) But hope rarely beats expectation; Trott did well for The Lions in South Africa but the tour to the West Indies was a painful business.
I was there for his final test at Barbados. Another Trott innings I can't remember much about but this time due to brevity rather than my failing memory. No - one was surprised he got out, he'd scratched around in the first two tests, been bounced out by Shannon Gabriel in the first innings of this one and somewhere along the line made a horrible mess of a catch. LBW to Jerome Taylor, he walked quickly head down from the field and then ran up the pavilion steps like a man fleeing the scene of a crime. Up the pristine white steps of the cruise ship style pavilion underneath the blue bowl of the Caribbean sky. The England supporters in the 3 W's stand gave him a proper, standing ovation, send off which showed what the majority of cricket supporters felt about him; nobody doubted he was leaving test cricket.
But he went on to play four more seasons of county cricket for Warwickshire. Perhaps he, once again, hurried back too quickly because the 2015 summer was rough for Trott who averaged just 25. If sides had once thought to get him out LBW now the theory was the short ball would do for Trott.
I saw him bat on a lovely high summers day at Guildford against Surrey. Trott was well set and Surrey brought on Stuart Meaker to bowl some short stuff. The cut isn't a shot I associate with him, perhaps his, at the ball, leg side, style didn't favour it and when he did play the short ball onto the off side it was more a steer. He made an exception for Stuart Meaker, this was a proper cut shot no attempt to keep the ball on the ground it went flat and low and tolled like a bell when it clattered into the temporary stand. Surrey let him get on with it - 123 for Trott. After that I expected him to have a Marcus Trescothick end to his career, dominating the county championship. It didn't really happen, which isn't to say he didn't do well, averaging 46,41 and 52 in his last three seasons, he remained the best batsman in the Warwickshire side. I saw him score a serene 150 in a losing cause against Surrey at the Oval where the only sense of disturbance was when he got out trying to force the score with the tail. But the big hundreds were just that bit less frequent than before, he did sometimes get out when well set. And I shouldn't complain, if Trott had to be in his own words a "mess to want it as badly as you need to" then it was a good thing if he wanted it a little bit less.
I suppose I should write something about Trott as a one day player. Statistically that is where he was at his best, a list A average of 48, a scarcely credible 51, in one day internationals. But I can't say I remember any of his hundreds in that format although I'm sure I must have seen a couple at least. In part because my preference is for long form cricket but also because Trott was a labourer in one day matches, it was his job to be the steady centre batting for 40% of the innings, setting a pace from which others could accelerate. Trott was happy going along at five or so an over and quite often the opposition didn't mind that either. There were some England supporters who weren't so happy with Trott's rate of scoring but a strike rate of 77 per 100 balls was hardly a world away from Joe Root's 86.
All good things come to an end. In May of 2018 Trott announced he would retire at the end of the season. There's always something sad about a player you have followed through his career retiring. Trott's announcement left me with a familiar but not comforting awareness of my own mortality, but my sadness was for me and not for him. He'd had a good career, couldn't go on for ever and was already doing bits and pieces of media and coaching work, Trotty will be fine. And the best cricketers never fully leave us, Trott will always be there, in my minds eye, coming forward and, with the ball somehow on the bat, turning his wrists just enough to send it running away, hugging the grass on its way to the mid - wicket boundary.
My last great Trott innings wasn't a hundred, it was only a fifty and against Glamorgan at Edgbaston in June. But he batted beautifully that day, onto the front foot and effortlessly working the ball through the leg side, he even brought the cover drive out, 57 off 88 balls before Ian Bell ran him out. Bell and Trott combined to better effect at Hove to put on 230 and pretty much confirm Warwickshire's promotion to division 1 in the penultimate match of the season. I missed Trotty's farewell at Edgbaston, neither of us are good at goodbyes and he only scored 8. Warwickshire won though, teams with Jonathan Trott playing for them generally did.
My last great Trott innings wasn't a hundred, it was only a fifty and against Glamorgan at Edgbaston in June. But he batted beautifully that day, onto the front foot and effortlessly working the ball through the leg side, he even brought the cover drive out, 57 off 88 balls before Ian Bell ran him out. Bell and Trott combined to better effect at Hove to put on 230 and pretty much confirm Warwickshire's promotion to division 1 in the penultimate match of the season. I missed Trotty's farewell at Edgbaston, neither of us are good at goodbyes and he only scored 8. Warwickshire won though, teams with Jonathan Trott playing for them generally did.
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