Neal Collins cricket
Cricket has a problem. A dark secret. It has nothing to do with match-fixing, ball-tampering or rule-changing. Sadly, this is far more serious. The gentleman’s game has a suicide rate currently running at two and a half times England’s national rate.
The latest professional to take his own life was former Nottinghamshire and Durham batsman Mark Saxelby. His suicide followed those of Kent and Surrey’s Danny Kelleher and Yorkshire and England wicketkeeper David Bairstow just three among 151 listed in a soon-to-be-published book on the subject.
Former Test opener Chris Broad, Saxelby’s former team-mate at Notts, says in November’s The Cricketer magazine: “When you finish with the game and you find people are not interested in your services, that is when the depression can set in. Rejection is a horrible feeling.”
Saxelby was aged just 31. The 2m left- hander, also a useful rugby player, appeared outwardly relaxed and well short of his sell-by date.
The theory goes that, after successful summers at Nottinghamshire and Durham (where he scored more than 1 000 runs in his debut season, 1994) he had been “found out” though he relished real pace, Saxelby’s batting suffered against spin. Rival county captains had spotted this weakness and pinpointed it. His form suffered, his Durham contract wasn’t renewed.
Saxelby opted to play on with Derbyshire League club Heanor Town, where he scored 2?600 runs at an average of more than 60 in two summers.
Peter Thompson, their cricket manager, recalls: “He was the top batsman in the Derbyshire Premier League. No bowler escaped. He helped us finish runners-up in 1999 and 2000.
“He was quiet, bordering on the shy, but he went about his business as a professional.”
On October 12, at The Barge, a pub on the River Trent in Newark, Saxelby was taken ill. He was rushed to hospital in Nottingham, where he died in some pain. The inquest revealed he had taken a lethal dose of the weedkiller Paraquat; it had been self-administered. There were no suspicious circumstances.
Subsequent investigation reveals that, though outwardly relaxed about his dismissal from Durham, Saxelby suffered inwardly and had been for psychiatric treatment.
As the only country where cricket is played full-time, one might have expected some kind of parachute for ex-professionals, given that they are believed to be the lowest paid full-time sportsmen in the world, with an average salary of 18?000 a year, some 2?000 below the national average.
Many are forced to take part-time jobs in the winter batsman Graham Thorpe fills his non-England winters by painting and decorating. Unlike modern footballers and, recently, rugby union players, only those at the very top of the game earn enough to be financially secure.
Broad adds: “There is a problem in the game, and it’s not being confronted. It’s impossible to say if Mark might have been saved if he had had more help but there is no system in place to help players who are no longer wanted.”
The Professional Cricketers’ Association actually sets aside 50?000 a year to help players with post-career education and winter jobs.
The most worrying statistics of all come from cricket writer David Frith, who has written a book titled By Their Own Hand. There he lists 80 cricketing suicides. His new book, the soon to be published Silence of the Heart, lists 151 of them 23 of them Test cricketers.
Frith says: “I raised the subject recently with Barry Richards, the South African star who is now chair of the Federation of International Cricketers Association, who admitted that something had to be done for players who were nearing the end of their career.”
Frith has only discovered six major soccer suicides and one in golf. He can find none in top-class tennis.
He says: “Cricket becomes obsessional. Cricketers are hardly ever away from the game, day or night. They play together, eat together, travel together. Suddenly it’s over and what are they left with?”