Cricket Australia’s realisation there’s more to life than bat and ball
The rise in mental health issues is highlighting the changing landscape of cricket, and it’s also showing that young players must be pushed to enjoy a life outside the game, writes Robert Craddock.
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A throwaway line from Tim Paine about the pressures of a “cricket only’’ life has spot-lighted why the game must continue its push to broaden the minds of Australia’s best young players.
Test captain Paine has emerged as an unruffled Joe Cool who handles the good and bad days with the same implacable demeanour.
But he admits there were times when a narrow cricket focused life put extreme pressure on him that shackled his natural game.
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“I think going back to when I was 16 or 17 I wish I knew what I knew now,’’ Paine said recently.
“I would have been a lot better at school, because I think having something else in my life would have alleviated some of the pressure I put on myself to perform at cricket and would have allowed me to go out and play a little bit more fearlessly, which I would have loved to be able to do but I’ve never allowed myself to do because I’ve always had all my eggs in one basket.’’
It’s this very issue Cricket Australia is trying to tackle in a fresh push to get players to spend eight hours a week either preparing for life after cricket or putting back into the community.
It’s not an earth-quaking move but it is a step in the right direction as the game tackles its confronting mental health crisis.
Informal research tells us that many young cricketers are too “cricket centric’’ for their own good.
Particularly with young batsmen, the pressure to succeed becomes so intense that it simply overwhelms them because they have gambled everything on succeeding at sport.
When he joined a list of 46 Australian Test captains, Paine’s name sat beside men whose professions included shopkeeper, pharmacist, crime reporter, bookmaker, plumber, investment consultant, grazier, postman, dentist, clerk, whisky agent, bank officer, solicitor and sales promotion officer.
It’s an enchanting honour roll full of exotic storylines but the days of the sportsman who can successfully juggle work and play are gone and they are not coming back.
The colourful eras of players sharing their sporting career with full-time jobs will never return but cricket still must try to tilt the work life balance back towards normality.
When a young David Hookes was rocketing to prominence in the late 1970s Greg Chappell warned him “make sure you realise touring life is Disneyland. It’s not the real world. If you accept it as that you can step in and out. If you think it’s the real world you’ve got problems.’’
Even when full-time professionalism swamped the game in the 1990s the best players often had ways to distract themselves from the searing pressures of professional sport.
Former school-teacher Ian Healy dabbled in the fashion world, Mark Taylor is a qualified surveyor, Mark Waugh had his horses, Matthew Hayden his cook books, Steve Waugh loved photography, Ricky Ponting was an ace golfer and greyhound follower.
As a famous writer once said “if all you know is cricket, what do you really know?’’
Originally published as Cricket Australia’s realisation there’s more to life than bat and ball