Amateur psychologists to be avoided in Yardy's case

[vvvslaxman]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2011/mar/27/michael-yardy-geoffrey-boycott-depression Amateur psychologists to be avoided in delicate Michael Yardy debate Some from the England squad and management have been away since the end of October, with only three nights at home. Surely this ought to be illegal under employment law? The brutality of the international cricket calendar may – repeat, may – have exacerbated Michael Yardy’s unhappiness. Photograph: Rebecca Naden/PA The other day Radio 4 called in search of a sporting perspective for a poetry documentary on the Stevie Smith verse, Not Waving But Drowning. The first thought here in the fun department was that an awful lot of pretending goes on in professional sport. One act, regularly seen at the highest level, is the over-promoted sportsman who is raised beyond his talent. This is the twilight world of the one-cap wonder. The good club player is burned by the heat of international competition. But sport is about the exhibition of strength and the concealment of weakness, so the struggling performer must keep smiling to the gallery and hope the demons are not too vindictive when the lights go out. Geoffrey Boycott, not everyone's obvious first port of call for tea and sympathy, was sniffing around this point when he made a hefty and controversial assumption about the depression that drove Michael Yardy home from the Cricket World Cup. To Boycott, Yardy was out of his depth in the England one-day team and was having trouble dealing with that fact. "He must have been reading my comments about his bowling, it must have upset him," Boycott said, thus managing, with exquisite egocentricity, to make it all about Geoffrey Boycott, not Michael Yardy. "Geoff the Psychiatrist" would have made an excellent Viz cartoon character, but is not much use in the assessment of the infinite complexity that is the human psyche. The covering up is the most poignant part. Ravi Bopara says he knew something was up when Yardy stopped coming to his room for a "game of Fifa". Who would have thought a video game named after Sepp Blatter's lakeside gerontocracy would feature so tellingly in the story of a cricketer's cry for help? "He hadn't been popping in and I kept questioning him why," Bopara said. "So I did notice something." Michael Vaughan, the former England captain, says: "They [Yardy's colleagues] probably won't have seen too much wrong with Michael, and that just shows you how much acting these guys have to do in front of their team-mates, so it must be terrible when they're in their own room with no one else watching them." The tension between sportsman as gladiator and the darker realities of loneliness, self-doubt and homesickness is there all the time. It breaks the surface only when an individual reaches such a level of psychic discomfort that he can take no more and heads for home. For Yardy, this must have been immensely difficult. Alongside his courage sits the suspicion, encouraged by Boycott, that he baled out because he knew he was not good enough to wear an England shirt. Reductionist judgments by amateur psychologists are to be avoided. Who among us can guess what was passing through Yardy's head, at the World Cup or anywhere? Marcus Trescothick, on the other hand, told us pretty clearly, in his autobiography, which recounts the story of him slumping in the corner of a Heathrow airport shop as he was about to board a flight to Dubai. "My mind was pulling itself apart in a hundred directions," he wrote. "Then came the pictures in my head; specific, enormous, terrifying images. What was happening at home? Was Haley OK? Was Ellie all right? I couldn't distinguish between what was real and what I imagined to be real ... things, beings, beasts, bastards ... attacked in waves, one after another, each worse than the one before. 'Oh God, please, make it stop. Oh go, please make it stop.'" This harrowing passage can't be tacked on to some sermon about the stresses of touring, or modern sport – but it would be a disservice to Trescothick, Yardy, or Shaun Tait (the Australian paceman who took a break in 2008, citing "physical and emotional exhaustion") not to shine a light on the brutality of the international cricket calendar, which may (repeat, may) have exacerbated Yardy's unhappiness. Though not an Ashes player, Yardy went to New Zealand voluntarily to prepare himself for the World Cup and had been on the road for more than five months. Some from the England squad and management have been away since the end of October, with only three nights at home. Surely this ought to be illegal under employment law? If a working man marched off to other continents for six months and came home for three days in all that time he would probably be demonised as an absentee or deadbeat dad. When wealthier people do it we call them England cricketers. Please let's not mention the armed services. Signing up for wars is not the same as being forced on to a pitiless fixtures treadmill to satisfy the needs of sponsors, governing bodies and television. While the schedule places intolerable strains on family life, cricket – the people, the game – has handled with impressive sensitivity the problems of Trescothick and Yardy, as well as the decision by Steven Davies, the wicketkeeper, to be open about his sexuality. But it does make you wonder how many of the people we watch in sport are, to borrow from Stevie Smith, much further out than we thought.