The Great Depression

GH on a new book about cricket's life of the mind

I have played cricket for fifty years. I quit at least once every season. It will be after a barren day, another afternoon apparently wasted. Why, I’ll wonder, am I putting myself through this over and over again? How is that if there’s a good catch/bad decision/needless run out around, I am drawn to it as if by magnet? That’s it, I’ll decide - I’ll give it one more week. And, amazing to say, usually something good will happen. It needn’t be to me; it could easily be something communal, or soulful or funny to which I’ll be witness; and it will be OK again. Until the next time, which will come sure as night follows day.

This is, of course, absurd, even if the absurdity tends to make it more pronounced. When you’re pursuing something voluntarily that is designed for pleasure but induces opposite sensations, the universe can seem to be having a right old joke at your expense. Imagine doing it for a living! And it happens that, just right now, professional sport, the dream of so many, is undergoing one of its periodic spasms of soul searching. The Selwoods in Aussie rules; Jarren Duran in baseball; Michael Phelps and Lolo Jones among Olympians: all provide cautionary tales. Mental illness’s brutal toll on the NFL has emerged. Suicides among American college athletes have doubled in the last twenty years. It’s as good a time as any for Andrew Murtagh, a first-class cricketer of the 1970s turned teacher then writer, to publish Cricket’s Black Dog, relating ‘the story of depression among cricketers.’