Pros need to find their inner amateur

"I GUESS you could call it a passion, but it is so much more than that," Alastair Cook said last summer. And he wasn't talking about cricket.

"I GUESS you could call it a passion, but it is so much more than that," Alastair Cook said last summer. He was not talking about cricket, or batting, or facing fast bowling, or captaining England, but his love of farming.

When you've got your hands down a sheep's gullet, your mind is occupied by thoughts other than your grip, stance and backlift, or the opposition's fast bowler. "It gives balance in my life," he said.

Cook's team are in Alice Springs, a cricketing outpost, this week for a rare few days away from the pressure cooker that is international sport. They cannot escape scrutiny completely: there are interviews to do, practice to endure and a two-day match to complete against a Cricket Australia Chairman's XI before they go to Adelaide and the next chapter of the Ashes story. Still, there was a chance to travel to Uluru and unwind, an opportunity of which many of the players and backroom staff availed themselves.

It is a hiatus in competition that recalls a simpler, perhaps more enjoyable age; an age when every tour included not only first-class games against state teams, but one-day or two-day games against up-country XIs. These games were not always relaxing affairs because they usually provided an opportunity for the local farmers or miners to get drunk and sledge the touring team to high hell. But the games had a charm of sorts and allowed players to take their minds off Test cricket for a while.

This is my seventh tour to Australia, either as a player or as an observer, eighth if you include the Youth World Cup of 1987, which I enjoyed as an England Under-19 player. The senior tours have changed beyond recognition in a generation. My first senior tour, in 1990-91, was the last that included regular up-country games in places such as Geraldton , Port Pirie, and Albury-Wodonga. The tour lasted five months but had irregular peaks of intensity, unlike now, when players are expected to be at fever pitch throughout.

Rest days had gone by this stage but were a feature of Test matches in England until the early 1990s. There were tensions, of course there were, but players and journalists mixed happily in the same hotels and same bars, and England and Australia players socialised together with great frequency. Players loaded their own bags at the airports, queued up with fellow travellers and ate breakfast in public restaurants with supporters. They were not in a hermetically sealed world of their own.

This was a world where David Gower could contemplate a trip in a Tiger Moth during a state game in Queensland, where Gower and Allan Lamb nipped off to a casino on the Gold Coast in the middle of a Test match, where senior players would be given time off during first-class games to explore the country, to get away and make decisions on their own. They had a certain amount of freedom.

The 1990s was also an unsuccessful time for English cricket. The fines dished out to Gower and John Morris for their escapade in the Tiger Moth, and to Gower and Lamb for their casino trip, revealed the tensions between some players who still had an amateur mindset and wanted to "play hard" on tour, and a management that was determined to professionalise and improve English cricket and make sure players were not so much playing hard but working hard.

During the past 20 years or so that process has accelerated. Every touring party that leaves for Australia claims for itself the tags of "best prepared" and "most professional". When England had its tour photo in Sydney a few weeks ago, there were 36 places to accommodate for a backroom staff that micromanages the players' every need. Players eat special food, no longer remove their own bags from airport baggage halls, train in the presence of various coaches, practise in nets under the eye of the same and recover under the same scrutiny as well.

It is an approach that has produced great success and made good players better, but in the light of Jonathan Trott's departure and the recent troubles experienced by Michael Yardy and Marcus Trescothick, among others, it is time perhaps to acknowledge that such an approach may have its casualties as well.

This week David Hopps, a cricket writer with the website Cricinfo, quoted an unnamed England player relating his experiences with the senior side last year. "It can feel as if there is no escape," he said. "It is as if everything you do is being assessed, as if every little thing you do is being analysed and stored away. If you're not careful it can wear you down. It is incredibly difficult to come to terms with."

Recent experiences of some Australia players under the Mickey Arthur regime suggested something similar. There was talk of young players "'jumping at shadows" and being under such scrutiny from an army of coaches that they had lost the freedom and confidence to make decisions for themselves and play their own way. They had to fill in daily "wellness charts", detailing fluid intake, food eaten and the number of hours slept. All for backroom staff under pressure, no doubt, to justify their positions.

An encouraging early feature of Darren Lehmann's regime was the stripping away of that nonsense and the emphasis on enjoyment, on playing the game.

It is hard not to have enormous sympathy for the modern player. Of course, there are compensations: they earn significant sums of money and they and their families are looked after in ways we could not have imagined. There is now a recognisable duty of care towards any player, such as Trott, who is struggling.

The story told about a football manager by a former colleague who suffers from mental health issues made me chuckle. How, my friend asked the football manager, who was a wise and compassionate and humane man, would you deal with a player who admitted to mental health problems? "Put him on the transfer list," was the reply. Clearly, times have moved on. Trott will get the best possible care.

However, Trott's story demands that players themselves, and management, address the way modern sport is going. There is no need to try to make players more professional, in the way Graham Gooch felt the need with Gower 20 years ago. In fact, the opposite is the case. Luiz Felipe Scolari, Brazil's World Cup-winning coach, put it best when he said: "My priority is to ensure that the players feel more amateur than professional. Thirty to 40 years ago the effort was the other way around. Now there is so much professionalism we have to revert to urging players to like the game, to love it, to do it with joy."

Players, too, must try to find a life beyond cricket. Next week, Cook plays his 98th consecutive Test match. It is an incredible run. He is a marvellous player: technically sound, mentally strong, incredibly ambitious, with a huge appetite for scoring runs.

As much as his technique, drive and ambition, and the help given to him by Gooch, he has managed international cricket so well because he has an interest that consumes him beyond it.

"My idea of bliss is to wake up early and go out shooting on my own away from everything," he said last year. "After a long shift on Friday we all go down to The Green Man and have a few pints. The fact that I am England captain is neither here nor there."

Cook happened upon his love of farming by serendipity, through his wife. One of the most important reasons for his success happened by chance. Not everything can be micromanaged.

THE TIMES