A little bit of home © Getty Images

Adelaide Oval is routinely, if not rather unimaginatively, considered the most picturesque of Australian cricket grounds. Indeed, it takes that status rather for granted, and like a self-regarding beauty queen has been rather letting itself go these past few years. The Eastern Stand has damn all to recommend it; the profusion of canopies apparently inspired by Jean Paul Gaultier’s famous bra – think Madonna, on her ‘Blonde Ambition’ tour - don’t do much for the eye either. At least, though, the ground is not hemmed in by the skyscraper stands so popular elsewhere. Its communal benches and grassy verges defy the trend to one-bum, one-seat tyranny, while the 1912-vintage scoreboard provides a pleasing sense of continuity. Cricket in Adelaide, too, will always sound enchanting on radio: with bowlers operating from either the River or the Cathedral Ends, you could almost be listening to a broadcast from England.

In all, it is a ground on a scale and of a character a little more congenial to English visitors. There is something for Andrew Flintoff’s team to build on here, too, even if the conjecture about Glenn McGrath’s injury seemed like something calculated to help the Barmy Army’s morale, rather than seriously to incommode Australia. They had the better of the game against South Australia. The pitch will probably not deteriorate fast enough to deviate significantly for Warne: benign weather in the mid-20s is expected. We’ve even had a little rain, which briefly rinsed the outfield yesterday, the ground staff hastening to protect the pitch and the sponsors’ symbols on the outfield – fortunately in that order.

So, with a favouring breeze and a ration of good fortune, England could work their way back into the series here tomorrow. The toss may not even be quite so loaded as it was in Brisbane. The team batting second has led at half-way in three of the last six Tests, and Australia lost here three years ago despite making 556 in their first innings, 400 of them on the first day. The alternative? If England lose in Adelaide, at least Michael Vaughan can stop worrying about a comeback to Test cricket in this series. There won’t be any point.

	So much talent; so little pleasure © Getty Images

Back in Melbourne for a day, I’m shortly to heft my gear and head for training at the Yarras. Nothing, I find, makes you keener for cricket yourself than a few days watching it. This is actually the first summer I’ve forsaken the pleasure of my weekend game in order to cover a Test series. I even had misgivings about covering the Ashes of 2005, because of the dent it would leave in my pre-season - a period of the year I always love, when hope has not yet been dashed against the rocks of experience.

I can usually justify watching good cricket by what I learn from it. In Brisbane, I was positioned in the media overspill upstairs, at 45 degrees to the action: a superior vantage from which to admire the degree to which Shane Warne varies his speeds and trajectories, and to watch how far forward Kevin Pietersen stretched in playing him. In general, I always come away from watching top-class batsmen resolved to take a longer front foot stride, and bend my front leg more – which, of course, I immediately forget. I also noticed at the Gabba a little ritual of Matthew Hayden’s after letting the ball go, moving rhythmically back and forward from his final position, testing the balance and security of the platform erected by his footwork. Someone at training tonight will probably wonder aloud why I’m doing the Nutbush.

Yet, notwithstanding that I’m in the twilight of a mediocre career, I’d never gratuitously run down the game the Yarras play. We enjoy our cricket – a quality conspicuously lacking from England’s tour so far. For a weekend cricketer who gets by on the occasional glimpse the possible, a spectacle like Steve Harmison’s travails on the first day at Gabba is always poignant. We might bowl that way because we can’t help it; he can. So much ability, so little pleasure.

Australian players in general are far better at preserving the spark of fun in their cricket. A pioneer in this respect, I think, was Mark Taylor. I recall a press conference at the end of the Perth Test in February 1995. Amid much sapient and sympathetic nodding, Mike Atherton had lamented the glutted cricket calendar, saying it made for weary players and lower standards. When the proposition that too much international cricket being played was put to his Australian counterpart, Taylor replied, with that distinctive upward inflexion: ‘No. And I think I speak for all the blokes. I love Test cricket.’ The answer impressed me: I wasn’t surprised when they went on to beard the joyless West Indians in their den. Indeed, I've never heard a captain, before or since, and with such sincerity, use the word ‘enjoy’ when talking about cricket.

Although I’m missing a bit of cricket this summer, I don’t entirely lose the community of my club, for the Yarras have a sizeable diaspora. While in Brisbane, I caught up with Em, Big Al, Churchyard, Sis and Knockbax; in Adelaide, I’m looking forward to the company of Bloodbath. The Yarras might not be the biggest, strongest or richest cricket club going around - but by golly we care about nicknames. In this respect, JL, Haydos, Punter, Marto etc also have nothing to teach us.

	Ricky Ponting caught in the act © Getty Images

A common cry is that professionalism has turned our cricketers into mere automata, similar in many more respects than they are different. Cricket Australia’s compendious media guide provides some empirical support for the complaint, having surveyed each of the country’s first-class players of their heroes, philosophies, recreations, and favourite dishes. If it wasn’t for barbecues, it soon emerges, many Australian cricketers would surely starve.

Yet perhaps the most revelatory dimension of the questionaire involves bad habits, where Australian cricketers reveal themselves as almost abjectly inoffensive. Some are lazy. Some are messy. Justin Langer may leave wet towels on the bathroom floor. His wife tells him he does; he apparently remains unconvinced. Political correctness has made inroads. Metrosexual South Australian rookie Lachlan Oswald-Jacobs chides himself for failing to lift the toilet seat; cerebral New South Welshman Greg Mail confesses to ‘studying maths’. Doesn’t anyone smoke, or drink, or shag any more? Shane Jurgensen owns up to ‘annoying my wife’; the alternative of annoying other people’s wives would surely be far more interesting. While on the subject of wives, Shane Warne’s worst habit is ‘losing things’.

Runaway bestseller among bad habits, and the choice of champions, is nail biting, conceded by the following: Ricky Ponting, Shane Watson, Mitchell Johnson, Michael Bevan, Brad Haddin, Moises Henriques, Tim Lang, Aaron O’Brien, Grant Roden, Craig Philipson, Dan Marsh, Damien Wright, George Bailey, Tim Paine, Michael Klinger, Adam Crosthwaite, Dirk Nannes, Peter Siddle, Jon Holland, Alex Doolan, Grant Baldwin, Matthew Gale, Murray Bragg. Maybe they taught it at the Academy. You could cut the tension in the Victorian dressing room with a knife: it contains no fewer than seven cricketers hard at work gnawing their cuticles. It must be an atmospheric place, too, what with Jason Arnberger’s ‘foot odour’, Matthew Harrison’s ‘flatulence’ and Brad Hodge ‘wiping underarms with towelettes in public places’.

Gnawing at nails may ease butterflies, but it isn’t exactly going to sweep the nation. In Australia, there is a nostalgic hankering for cricketers cut from a coarser cloth – thus the strange post-career celebrity of David Boon, always bemoaning the constant harking back to his beer drinking record en route to England, yet cheerfully and lucratively the poster boy for a brewer. Drinking 50 Gatorades on the way to England somehow doesn’t cut the mustard. Perhaps the problem is that we now know too much about too little. If Australian cricketers can’t develop some diverting habits, it’s arguable they should give up answering questionaires.

	Rain here was always a phantom of English, and cricketing, imagination © Getty Images

Text messages began arriving from friends in England about 6am. Could I stick my hand out the window and check for raindrops? Alas, the curtains parted to reveal a cloudless sky. Weather in Queensland doesn’t have the famous consistency of that experienced in the Pennines, but rain here was always a phantom of English imagination, based more on the electrical storm that curtailed a one-sided Ashes Test eight years ago than on instinctive feeling for local meteorology.

Trusting in the efficacy of a timely rain these days, too, is a little like believing in the Cottingley Fairies. Rain seldom exerts the influence on Tests as of yore. Games unfold so speedily, and so frequently involve mismatches, that even a lost day is insufficient to make avert the inevitable. The last Test verifiably ruined by rain was the knife-edge contest between Australia and India at Chennai just over two years ago. It wasn’t rain that held Australia up at the Oval in 2005 but bad light, thanks to the fixture’s lateness in the summer. Mind you, ‘Is It Cowardly to Pray for Bad Light?’ (2005) wouldn’t have made such an apt title for Rob Smyth’s delicious book.

Brisbane used to have fabulous reputation for rain, the Ashes Tests of 1928, 1936, 1946 and 1950 spiralling down the drain for whomever was the butt of the conditions. So farcical was the last, featuring one day in which twenty wickets fell for 120 runs, that Marylebone requested Brisbane’s removal from the rota of Test match venues ‘for climatic and financial reasons’; the Australian Board of Control for International Cricket insisted that the Gabba remain, ‘in the interests of Australian cricket’. These interests were well served when Australia, under pitiless sun, won the next Test there by an innings and 154 runs.

There has been some harking back to that Test in the last week, the Sunday Times among others invoking the example of Frank Tyson as a possible inspiration for Steve Harmison, the Douglas Corrigan of fast bowling. But the belief in the significance historical antecedents is perhaps even emptier than the trust in rain. How many series, and games, and careers, genuinely parallel another, in anything other than the most superficial senses? Cricket, of course, is a game replete with superstitions. But as one who has put his left pad on first for decades and still hardly made a run, I can assure you that they are not much help and little consolation.

	Police have been administering the Killjoy Act with the help of CCTV © Getty Images

Great concern this summer attended the arrival of the Barmy Army, whose songs, chants and general bonhomie, it was feared, would drown out Australian fans, and render Tests inhospitable – or, at least, interfere with time-honoured parochialism and partisanship which Aussies regard as the natural state of things.

In fact, both the Army and their antipodean rivals have here been kept well and truly under a pretty coarse thumb by the police, administering the Killjoy Act with the help of CCTV. Only Pat Buchanan is more hostile to the Mexican wave than the potentates of the Gabba. Yet Cricket Australia is poorly placed to be pointing the finger at anyone – it is looming as a far more exasperating noise polluter than any group of fans.

Those at home moaning about the ad breaks and Greig-o-grams on Channel Nine are actually getting off lightly; I have hardly known a noisier Test match. Even the first morning, when one might have expected a breathless hush in the close, was punctuated by deafening advertisements and pointless announcements on the public address system. No cricketer on the field has been celebrated so lustily as ‘the lovely Sheree and her team from 3’, the corporate nymphs and dryads distributing the main sponsor's bounty, while the loudest voices have been of Talking Boony, Talking Beefy and Talking Bollocks – the bonehead at the microphone who lets us in to such milestones as Ricky Ponting’s 9000th Test run, of which he informed the fact-starved masses in the middle of an over on the third afternoon.

Pop songs begin playing at 8am every day – or to be precise, they’ve been playing when I’ve arrived at that time, and they may well be on an endless 24-hour loop, deafening the cleaners as well. At various intervals, the crowd has also been serenaded by the troubadour Greg Champion. His rendition of a puerile anti-Pom jingle to the tune of The Lion Sleeps Tonight – ‘They whinge away, they whinge away, they whinge away, they whinge away, they whinge away, they whinge away (repeat * 445) – at least drew an apology from Queensland Cricket’s CEO Graham Dixon. The rest of it has been beyond sorry, and into the realm of unforgivable.

How badly does Australia cricket need the cash, that they should be have surrendered their temple to the money-lenders? Before the Test, patrons were invited to report to the authorities anyone noisy and uncouth enough to interfere with the enjoyment of others. The trouble is that, at the Gabba, the authorities have been noisiest and uncouth of all. Is it too late for me to dob in Cricket Australia?

	'Ponting's four-man attack have a lot of hard yakka ahead – well, some anyway' © Getty Images

The Ashes embodies cricket’s most traditional format: five five-day Tests played in white by daylight. Yet this has been fitted into a decidedly untraditional tour, the most anticipated series of modern times being shoehorned into six weeks, beginning with an unprecedented double header.

For the most part, this has been England’s problem, with only three second-class practice matches to prepare for back-to-back Tests - rather like trying to soup up a Go Kart to compete at the drag racing strip with the addition of some GT stripes. At the Gabba today, it became Australia’s, blessed with a first-innings lead of 445, but burdened with the choice of whether to enforce the follow-on.

Twelve years ago I was at the Gabba when Mark Taylor, with a lead of 259, and England’s openers Mike Atherton and Alec Stewart reaching for their pads, decided to bat again. Not quite the combination of Rommel and Mandela he later became, having not yet captained Australia to a Test victory, Taylor was roundly criticised for removing the Aussie boot from the pommie throat. In fact, he was probably ahead of the game. Not so long before he had enforced the follow-on against Pakistan at Rawalpindi and seen them bat Australia out of the game, Salim Malik putting his bat where his money had been with a masterful 237. Taylor reasoned that the eclipse of the rest day militated against bowling in consecutive innings, and also that his primo bowler, Warne, was advantaged by bowling on an older pitch – the whiz kid proved him right with his Test best 8-71. I remember Taylor confronted by one of his critics at the press conference afterwards, who insisted that England would have been psychologically destroyed by the follow-on. ‘Yeah,’ said the Tubmeister drolly. ‘I read that.’

What applied then applied trebly so in this Test. Reduced to four bowlers by the inclusion of Michael Clarke for the injured Shane Watson, Ponting would in choosing to bat again have been thinking ahead to the Adelaide Test that follows hot on this one’s heels. His four-man attack have a lot of hard yakka ahead – well, some anyway.

England would have been thinking ahead too. The first team to win a Test has been the team to take the Ashes in twenty-four of the thirty-one post-war series, and most of the seven comebacks were in an era when tours allowed space and scope to regroup after an initial defeat, 2005 being the glorious exception proving the rule. Even then the itinerary allowed nine days for England to regain its savoire faire. No such luck this time. Test cricket might be the longest of games, but England could be 2-0 down before it can draw a breath.

‘Shoddyline’. ‘Wide They Bother’. England’s woeful direction has already been a cause for rejoicing among tabloid headline writers. But the Gabba Test is also beginning to look a little like a tale of two lengths: England’s too predictably short, Australia’s suitably generous.

This was especially obvious in the afternoon, as Australia’s tail failed to expire of its own accord, the last three wickets spacing themselves over 133 runs. Glenn McGrath’s batting doesn’t usually tell a lengthy tale, but one ball in Steve Harmison’s 29th over yesterday told at least a little one. So predictable had Harmison’s intent become that Australia’s last man slid into position to play a hook before the ball was bowled; he shovelled it, inelegantly but effectively, to fine leg for a single.

In the Gabba Test of the 1974-5 Ashes – the series that is remembered as the harbinger of the era of epic fast bowling – Dennis Lillee was incandescent with rage when bowled a bouncer by Tony Greig, from which he was caught behind. He claimed it as a cassus belli for the bouncers he and Thomson sent England’s way; in reality, it was more a case of getting one’s retaliation in first.

England’s short bowling at the Australian tail on this occasion, however, showed both how familiar and how futile this tactic has become: the likes of Lee, Warne and Clark, heavily helmeted, comfortably upholstered, are not so easily intimidated. Alternatives were laid to one side. The yorker, standard issue in one-day cricket, was nowhere to be seen. The ball, having shown signs of swinging after 130 overs, was pounded in mindlessly short. As Lee and Clark laid about them in every direction, adding 50 in 44 balls, Flintoff seemed for the only time in the innings to lose his way as captain, scattering seven men to the boundary. Anderson certainly lost his way as a bowler, leaving Clark too much room to swing his arms; Clark carved him for consecutive, impudent sixes. The only chance the attack generated, to Cook at backward square leg, predictably went down, amid howls of execration.

With equal predictability, Ponting called his men in, denying England the meagre satisfaction of finishing Australia’s innings themselves, and testing the legs of a top order in the field for 155 overs. The same scheme worked for Ian Johnson when he declared at 8 for 601 here fifty-two years ago: England were swiftly four for 25. It did the job here too: Strauss’s miscued hook looked a weary shot. McGrath and his mimic Clark had batsmen caught in the cordon within five overs – the same achievement took England almost 142. Two lengths again: Australia look like making short work of England; England will benefit from a lengthy reflection on their efforts.

Sometimes you arrive at a cricket ground wondering if the day’s play will offer anything worth writing about; other days you are greeted by decision like the omission of Monty Panesar from England’s XI and there’s scarcely need to see a ball. Of course, you could see it coming a mile off, Duncan Fletcher’s three weeks of purse-mouthed pragmatism having softened watchers up. Yet it was somehow still a shock to be handed the England team sheet today: not quite a suicide note to rank with the 1983 Labour manifesto, but a failure of nerve and imagination.

Against Australia, thirty-three-year-old Giles averages 15 with the bat and 52 with the ball. He is an honest cricketer who has never disgraced himself, but he has not played a first-class game this year. Yet he has walked back into the England team at the expense of the world’s best orthodox finger spinner, nine years his junior, chiefly on the basis of his ancillary capabilities with the bat and in the field. It’s like a restaurant choosing a short-order cook over a chef de cuisine on the grounds he makes a better cup of tea. If a modest lengthening of the batting were sought, Sajid Mahmood would arguably have been the better bet – into the bargain, he would have been more adept than Anderson with the old ball. Any ball, if today was much to go by.

There’s no ignoring that Australia has an incontestable edge in its order from number seven onwards: Gilchrist, Warne and Lee are probably the best batting trio in their respective roles in the world. This edge, though, is so little narrowed by Giles’s selection that the gesture is scarcely worth making, and hardly at all at the cost of a bowler in Panesar who, as Flintoff noted yesterday, ‘gets good batsmen out’. This, I suspect, was the selection of a team for its appearance on paper rather than its efficacy in a match. In Ray Illingworth, England were said to have a ‘one-man committee’; Fletcher might be auditioning for the role of ‘one-man bureaucracy’.

After pondering Panesar, of course, it was on with the game, Steve Harmison’s first ball wide probably being worth a thousand words or two as well. The toss has conferred on Australia a considerable advantage – all the more reason to lament that England yielded them another at the selection table.

	Matthew Hayden describes the Gabba pitch as ‘your best friend one day and your worst enemy the next’ © Getty Images

It was Ian Rush who said that he could never get used to playing football in Italy; it was like living in a foreign country. Something similar applies to playing cricket in Australia. The surroundings are reassuringly Anglophone, from the right-hand-drive cars to the voice on the speaking clock. But appearances can be deceptive.

Traditionally, Australia in Ashes cricket have enjoyed far greater advantage from their conditions than England have from theirs. Australia won 46 and lost 43 Ashes Tests in England, but their lead at home stretches 80 to 54 – empirical attestation of Len Hutton’s advice that a touring team must be 25% better than Australia to beat them in their own backyard.

On the eve of a series in which England seek to parallel Hutton's feat of retaining the Ashes, the challenge to the English cricketer coming here is worth articulating. Firstly, he finds that that the ball bounces higher and carries further, while also requiring more art to move sideways, encouraging shorter lengths and more cross-bat strokeplay.

Then he finds Australian cricket mores famously tough. Nasser Hussain says that he made an abiding enemy of Mike Gatting when he failed to walk for a nick behind while playing for Combined Universities against Middlesex in the late 1980s. Australian cricketers not only give no quarter, they expect none. When Mike Atherton stood his ground after a nick and was reprieved, he quipped to Ian Healy: ‘When in Rome…’

Good Australian cricketers always seem to mature more quickly than their English counterparts - in part, ironically, because they winter in England almost as a matter of course. This is chiefly in order to round their experience; also because sterling’s strength relative to the Australian dollar ensures a good payday. English players seeking to narrow the trade deficit in cricketers, meanwhile, have to grin and bear the contempt for the standards of their game. On the honour board at his club in Perth, Alec Stewart’s name bears the inscription ‘Midland-Guildford and England’. As Stewart explained in his autobiography: ‘Nobody rates county cricket.’

Factors to do with the country rather than the cricket are just as significant. Heat is inseparable from our cricket experience: the earliest written reference to cricket in Australia, in the Sydney Gazette & New South Wales Advertiser on January 8 1804, is in the context of ‘intense’ and ‘immoderate’ weather. When Australian players wear jumpers, as Mark Waugh used always to wear a sleeveless pullover, it is for luck rather than warmth. Our grounds, moreover, are getting hotter: increasingly built up, coliseum-style; they are no longer cooled by natural breezes, while our sharper light and darker shadows can pose problems for fielders, especially late in the day.

The Australian landscape is confronting. One of the Bodyline tourists is said to have written home: ‘Dear Father, This country is just hundreds and hundreds of miles of damn all, and then hundred of miles more of it.’ Australian fans need no introduction, their unabashed nationalism streaked with sentimentality, their bonhomie a kind of challenge. ‘Yeah, it’s a great country,’ a cab driver informed Jim Swanton sixty years ago. ‘Remember it’s yours as well as ours – and if you don’t enjoy it here, it’ll be your own ruddy fault.’

It is less accurate to describe specific Australian conditions, however, than to talk of their range. Just as no Test nation features venues further flung, none has venues so various, in their shapes, sizes, pitches, personalities and characteristic meteorologies. It notoriously took an eternity to standardise the rail gauges of Australia’s states; they never did attend to the cricket grounds. This is a factor, indeed, that has subtly inflected selections. First-class runs in Adelaide have generally been felt a tad cheap – thus Darren Lehmann’s long apprenticeship before international selection. First-class runs in Brisbane, especially before Christmas by an opener, have always been thought hard-won – thus Matthew Hayden’s recurrent opportunities, and his succinct description in today's Courier-Mail of the Gabba pitch as ‘your best friend one day and your worst enemy the next’.

Australian cricket, nonetheless, is undergoing some subtle shifts. For reasons not entirely unassociated with money, cultivating pitches in situ being seen increasingly as an expensive indulgence, conditions have undergone a convergence in recent years. Perhaps the most disorienting change has been the transformation of Perth, formerly the hunting ground of Garth McKenzie, Dennis Lillee, Terry Alderman and Bruce Reid, into a pitch conducive to spin. Seven years ago, Australia’s selectors worried that young Brett Lee might get carried away by its pace and bounce, and decided to delay his Test debut until Melbourne. Just a few months ago, the promising Victorian leg-spinner Josh Mangan decided that his best opportunity lay in crossing the continent.

Ricky Ponting and Glenn McGrath have both complained recently about the increasing homogeneity of local conditions – specifically, of course, the idea that Australia might be sacrificing some of its home ground advantage. A longer-term concern is that it could well take a toll on the variety of its cricketers. That Australia has a team of the talents at present is in part a testimony to the opportunities offered by its terrain.

Australia is not such an alien landscape for the visiting cricketer as it was. The country is more cosmopolitan; the tours are more metropolitan. Internal distances that used to tax patience and credulity have been diminished, and intercontinental distances are no longer so intimidating; it's impossible to miss the Barmy Army heraldry around Brisbane, while Andrew Flintoff commented during his press conference today on the ‘unbelievable’ number of Preston natives he has met while strolling round. Yet after five weeks in India, England have not been here long enough to acculturate the differences on the playing field. For all the endless discussion of injuries and optimum formations, do not underestimate the dimension of the series impossible to change: that Australia are at home, and England away.

	'Professionalism tends to further fuse man and sport, to the point where failure does seem like a personal reflection' © Getty Images

One of the surprising features of Trescothick’s travails is that they should have befallen so consummate a professional. English cricket has had its Tufnells and Lewises, its Hicks and Corks; but Trescothick’s game has been so steady, his technique so economical, his manner so unflappable. Perhaps, though, therein lay the dilemma, that he undertook to tour because there seemed no professional alternative open, as Thorpe confessed became his own default setting: ‘I kept playing because I felt it would help me keep a grip on things. What else was I supposed to do?’

The response to Trescothick following Thorpe’s example and standing out of cricket has actually been pretty encouraging. Jeff Thomson found the germ of a jest in there, but Thomson lavishes the same thought to his public statements as he famously did in his bowling, just shuffling up and going wanggg. It’s arguable he should never have been chosen; but it’s also arguable that his selection was a risk in the same way as the choice of any player recovering from injury is a risk, like [Andrew] Flintoff with his ankle, [Ashley] Giles with his hip or [Steve] Harmison with his passport. At least, England did not dither as they did, for instance, in 1994-95 with Phil Tufnell, who Mike Atherton wanted to send home after a psychological breakdown in Perth, but whose contract was sufficiently ambiguous to prevent it. Saying that England will miss his runs‚ is nonsense; he was obviously not in the frame of mind to make any.

The question has been asked whether cricket has anything to do with Trescothick’s condition. I’ve lost count of the number of times that David Frith’s voluminous study of cricket’s suicides, Silence of the Heart (1999), has been brought into discussions. Seminal book that it is, I think its quest for comprehensiveness obscures as much as it reveals, the causal relation between sport and suicide being in many cases inherently unprovable. Cricket, too, has surely prolonged a few precarious existences as well as perhaps shortening them. There’s no doubt, all the same, that batting especially can be a lonely business, with long periods of contemplation before and after, and little immediate opportunity to redeem failure. Even a club cricketer at my own absurdly humble level feels it. I’ve been out three times this season: one good ball, one bad shot, one poor decision. It’s only a game, but it smarts, resonating with other misfortunes, disappointments, and shortcomings. Professionalism tends to further fuse man and sport, to the point where failure does seem like a personal reflection. Professionalism also involves a more or less constant monitoring of one’s own physical and psychological well-being and preparedness. Nothing is more difficult for the melancholic temperament to bear. William Styron’s recent death caused me to revisit his powerful description of the depressive predicament, Darkness Visible, which he saw as analogous to that of the ‘walking wounded’‚ in war.

	‘I kept playing because I felt it would help me keep a grip on things. What else was I supposed to do?’ © Getty Images

Thorpe’s book shows this suffering in a sport scenario, as he strives to play cricket while his mind seethes with the stresses of a ruined marriage. The need for the pretence of normality becomes a devastating aspect of his condition: ‘I infuriated myself with the rubbishy soundbites I spouted to the press about how I’d been through a difficult period but was now feeling fine. I’d go back to my hotel room and think to myself: ‘How the fuck could you say that? When clearly you’re not all right?’ But I was trying to portray an image of my professional self as being back on my feet. Perhaps if I said it enough times it might actually come true. Thorpe’s book also scotches the temptation to imagine that Trescothick might have forborne his problems had he made runs in either of his innings on tour. Thorpe did make runs while feeling bad, and the need to concentrate was momentarily therapeutic, but the effect did not last; if anything, sporting success offered steadily diminishing satisfaction, and eventually gall and wormwood.

‘Yeah, well, you may have just got a Test hundred against Sri Lanka but did it really give you a lift? Depression gives no quarter: there is anguish in failure and futility in success.