Brydon Carse incident points to a darker truth about life as a professional cricketer | The Secret Cricket Coach

Cricket is a brutal game – you are basically being judged all the time. It’s no wonder players seek out ways of coping

I once played with a young cricketer who would physically harm himself when he didn’t score enough runs. I won’t go into the detail of how because that isn’t really the point. The point is that a young professional cricketer had reached a place where getting out in a game of cricket meant he deserved to be hurt. The strange thing is that I understood it. Not the act itself, which was obviously extreme, but the feeling behind it. Cricket meant that much to him. It meant that much to all of us.

Nobody had ever told him that his value as a person depended on how many runs he scored. Cricket had been telling him, in more subtle ways, for years. I thought about him again when I read about Brydon Carse.