In the grand scheme of things, Marcus Trescothicks announcement a few days ago that he was retiring from international cricket is but a pebble on Chesil Beach. But it’s not alone. Trescothicks decision, based on the onset of an anxiety condition in recent years, comes a couple of weeks after Steve Harmison’s admission that whilst his 6′ 4″ frame was running in to bowl in New Zealand, a key internal organ was at home with his wife and newborn child.

A brief and entertaining handbag session followed in the English press between Harmison and Geoff Boycott. Boycs, now that he doesn’t have to face them on a regular basis, was clearly gunning for the quick bowlers, having also had a go at Aussie Shaun Tait for ‘lacking character’ in his decision to take a break from the game. Tait’s language suggests that he was starting to suffer with some form of depression or stress-related illness from the pressures of the game.

The Big Question

Tait, Harmison and Trescothick have all asked themselves an important question. A few years ago, months after the birth of our first child, I stood in a field somewhere near Darlington and thought ‘what am I doing here, playing cricket, when my family needs me at home?’ Maybe its a contagious disease of the North East, or maybe it’s about priorities. There comes a point when you find yourself standing in the corner of a field (or sitting at a desk, or about to board a plane on another trip), and the question ‘what am I doing this for?’ arrives, bags in hand, ready for a long stay in your psyche.

Shoe, But No Soul

Clark’s Shoes, whose irritating website fails to mention the number of people they’ve laid off in the last 40 years round these parts, used to employ thousands of people in UK factories, making shoes on piecework. Piecework is simple: the faster you work, the more money you get paid. However it was also highly specialised: 1 person stitched - all day every day. Another person stuck on the toe reinforcements - all day every day. And so on, for the 30-40 components or stages of work which made up the average shoe.

One bloke remarked to me, very honestly, that he hated his work and each day he went home less of a person, because he did the same thing, day in day out, minute in and minute out. Maybe all those lay-offs weren’t such a bad idea at all. Now those people can work on the tills at the Tesco superstore which stands on the site of the old factory.

Hope vs Despair

He was asking the question: ‘what am I doing this for?’, but beyond getting him depressed, it wasn’t leading to any change. That’s tragic. There’s a well-trodden quote “most men lead lives of quiet desparation” (most recently cited in the Ashes to Ashes finale this week). If the maths of change is dissatisfaction x opportunity, how many folk are trapped in a situation where opportunity is limited, or where change just seems too risky? Tibet and Burma show what happens if you attempt change when the powers are ranged against you. As Lisa Simpson sagely observed, prayer is “the last refuge of the desperate.” When we’re trapped and powerless, the only option left is God. Even if you don’t believe in him (see page 7 on the link).

An example from the positive side: Martin Luther King was effective as an agent of change because within this maths, he gave hope and vision to people who’d not seen it before. Their circumstances didn’t change, but their perception of those circumstances, and how they could respond, did.

Space, the Final Frontier

One of the side-effects of an increasing pace of life is less time to reflect. There simply isn’t time to ask good questions like ‘what am I doing this for’, nor space in cluttered lives to allow any major rearranging. I don’t know if they still make those puzzles where you have a matrix of sliding square pieces, with one slot empty, and slide the pieces around to make the picture. Only with the space is it possible to rearrange things, and make the picture whole. And we need that space: time and energy to make important decisions, decide on change, pay attention to key relationships etc. Without the space, these things all become extra items on the ‘to do’ list, a source of stress, not energy.

Which is why cricket is so great. It’s one of the only games in the world where you have sufficient time to wander round a field thinking ‘why am I doing this?’ The season starts next month.

Tags: david keen, touching base, cricket