THERE was a hugely refreshing change in tone and attitude when Jonathan Trott was forced by a stress-related illness to return home from the Ashes tour in Australia this week.

Trott’s plight drew ample sympathy and understanding from not just the tight-knit England cricket camp but also from across the game and even other sports where the issue of stress and depression has become more openly talked about and at last recognised for its debilitating and destructive damage.

There will be cynics no doubt who will counter how any top-class sportsman, who is well rewarded for trips around the world with all the best medical attention to hand and all needs catered for, can ever be subject to stress.

I doubt too whether there was much sympathy from Australian batsman David Warner.

Before the reasons for Trott’s exodus from down under were revealed, Warner, the man with the sourest caterpillar above his surly upper lip, claimed the batsman’s early dismissals in both innings of England’s first Test humiliation, showed him to be “pretty weak and poor”.

When England’s number three headed back home conflicted by an illness that had been “managed” for some time before the second Ashes series of the year, there was little in remorse or contrition from the gobby wallaby. Maybe a post-cricket career in the Australian diplomatic corps beckons.

Warner excepted, the general treatment of Trott has been one of goodwill for a man, who until the abject total England failure at the Gabba, was an integral part of England’s renaissance as a cricketing world power.

And that was in the most acute contrast to say when former England and Aston Villa forward Stan Collymore was judged to be suffering from depression and less so, but still so, when another England cricketer Marcus Trescothick revealed he too suffered prompting his return also from an Ashes tour in 2006/7.

Neanderthal attitudes still prevail but not to the extent that they did then and it is to the credit of Collymore and Trescothick that they were so frank, forthcoming and ultimately fearlessly brave about revealing the demons that stalked them.

Had there been more acceptance of the need to recognise just how crippling depression can be then the family and associates of German international goalkeeper Robert Enke might still be revelling in his being around and not mourning a husband, son, father, friend and team-mate. Enke took his own life in the most hideous way in 2009. He was just 32 years old.

When he committed suicide he was a realistic contender for the German squad to play at the 2010 World Cup after negotiating several testing spells at Benfica and Barcelona before finally settling at Hannover 96.

All was there ahead of him, but so consumed was he by what Sir Winston Churchill described as the “black dog” that Enke ended it all.

I’d describe Churchill’s description as somewhat erroneous as depression is no animate entity.

The horrific measure of depression is that it snares, surrounds, smothers and suffocates. In the most extreme cases, not even the most considered or frantic of pleas of closest family and friends can break the hold it has.

Like all serious conditions it is no respecter of age, of status, of class or creed. It is insistent, insidious and all-encompassing.

In its iron grip there seems no way out, no way back from the deepest and bleakest of places. The more you try to escape, the more the darkness deepens to the point where you may feel there is no way out. In conflict with this is the feeling that you have to stop it. Sometimes that can be fatal.

So just imagine all that magnified thousands-fold in the public eye of a major sports event raked over in the minutest of detail by a voracious media.

I can barely comprehend how someone like Messrs Collymore and Trescothick, especially during far less sympathetic times, were able to cope.

Jonathan Trott – take all the time you need and take the greatest of care.


Barbican banter bamboozles balls

OVERHEARD outside the Barbican yesterday – the venue for the UK Snooker Championship.

Young girl: “Mum, what is snooker?”

Mother: “It’s that thing where there’s a big green table and a load of balls.”

Hmmmm....


Time to tackle betting boom 

FOOTBALL’S tarnished image has grown still gloomier with the news this week of police investigating allegations of match-fixing.

Calls for it to be rooted out and the perpetrators heavily punished must be heeded, because it is an inalienable requirement of any sport that spectators who pay to watch it know it is not rigged, especially as a way of making money for criminals in betting scams.

But equally how ironic is it that there is all this wringing of hands and outbursts of outrage when you cannot move for yet another betting shop to open, or internet account to be launched, or app to be brazenly boasted about.

And who helps to advance this explosion but newspapers, television and the internet, who all prostitute themselves to enable the betting industry to further promote their get-rich-instantly schemes. It’s more than a flutter, it’s wholesale greed.