Coming Back To Me: The Autobiography of Marcus Trescothick

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There must have been a few watching because one week we raised £7. Each programme comprised eight pages of articles – Manager’s Message by Rick McCoy, Captain’s Corner, by Matthew Bliss, reports of previous matches and stats – results, scorers, today’s teams and goalscorers and appearances, and two special features called Player Analysis and Player Profile. The issue for our match against Bridge Farm on Thursday, 28 November 1985 (kickoff 3 p.m.) is a real collector’s item, as I am the Player in question.

In Player Analysis, Lee Cole writes: ‘Marcus Trescothick is a very good goalkeeper and has proved to be the best St. Anne’s have ever had.’ Lee was known to be an excellent judge.

In Player Profile it was my turn:

Full Name: Marcus Edward TrescothickBirth date: 25 December 1975Favourite Food: Bread and chipsNickname: TresWorst Food: MeatMost Embarrassing Moment: Letting in eight goalsFavourite Moment: Saving a penaltySuperstitions: NoneAmbition: To score a goal from a goal-kick.

I never was too sure about that rule.

In 1986, aged ten, I was first picked to play cricket for the county, Avon Schools, and had a reasonable start, top scoring with 75, and later St Anne’s made it through to the regional final of the English Schools Football Association six-a-sides. Though we failed to progress to the final at Wembley, I did find time to practise my autograph all over the page in the commemorative magazine set aside for getting other people’s.

Then, in 1987, three things happened that turned out to have somewhat more bearing on my later life.

First, on Sunday 21 June, aged 11, I scored the first-ever century for Avon Schools Under-11s, 124 against Devon at Exeter School. Two weeks later, against Worcestershire at the Bristol Grammar School ground at Failand, I scored 183 not out. When asked why he declared, the manager, Mike Docherty, apparently said: ‘If I let him get a double-hundred at his age, what else would he have to aim for?’ The innings caused quite a stir. The local BBC TV asked if they could come along and film the next match, but we weren’t comfortable with that. But the Bristol Evening Post decided to scrap their weekly Top Man cricket award and nominated me as Top Kid instead. Nice to see that the photo of me accompanying the article has me pointing the manufacturer’s label straight at the camera. My interest in schoolwork may have been minimal, but, even at this tender age, I was showing signs of sound commercial sense. Slazenger, since you ask.

Their interest suitably aroused, and Bristol being within their boundaries, Gloucestershire County Cricket Club then picked me to play for their Under-11s, and when I made a century for them in my second match, against Somerset at Frenchay CC, Somerset made enquiries, realized I was eligible to play for them because Keynsham was in their territory, and my Gloucestershire career was over. From now on I would be playing for Somerset, my dad’s county, my county.

The other thing that happened? A school trip to Torquay.

All kids get homesick, of course. But this was different. This was more or less unbearable. It was our last year at St Anne’s and they decided to take us all to Torquay for a week together before we all moved on to our senior schools. It was the first time I had been away from home in my life and I hated it. I just hated it. I cried and cried and cried. Even though I was with all my mates, and we couldn’t have been more than 100 miles or a couple of hours’ drive from Oldland Common, I just couldn’t bear being away from home. I wasn’t a bit sad, or down in the dumps. I was terrified, irrationally so, and that scared me even more. Away from mum and dad and my home and my sister and my cats and my stuff and outside of my place, all I felt was dreadful, but the moment I got home I was fine again, as if it had never happened. I told my folks I hadn’t enjoyed the trip much but I didn’t tell them any more. Photos of the trip showed me joining in and smiling and it can’t have been all bad. But there were moments when it was, and, from then on, I never felt really comfortable being away from my home, family, friends and the familiar again. Not long afterwards, I travelled to Cheltenham College for a county coaching clinic, felt terrible the moment I arrived, made up some story about not being well and asked mum to come and collect me the same day. Cheltenham? About 45 minutes from home.

Those feelings stayed within me, on and off, throughout a 15-year career in county and international cricket. For long periods they would disappear or lie dormant, and initially, even when they came, they were completely manageable. Playing top-level cricket gave me such a buzz that I could force them to one side. As time progressed, however, and the exhausting effects of burnout weakened my resilience, the feelings grew stronger and stronger.

Years later, when I discussed the history of my illness with my counsellor that week in Torquay took on great significance.

For now, however, the only thing on my agenda was sport, and plenty of it, as from September 1987 I joined the Sir Bernard Lovell Comprehensive School, also in Oldland Common. It probably didn’t take long for the teachers and staff to work out that they weren’t going to win any industry prizes for their work with me. An early indication of the kind of impact I would have in the classroom can be judged by the two credit notes I received in my first term, the first for ‘Full marks in the beautiful babies competition’, whatever that was, the next for ‘Effort in gathering a most interesting collection of personal items for display in class’. By 1988 I had graduated to ‘For giving freely of your time and interest to make the New Intake Parents’ Evening a success’ and ‘Doing a week of litter duty’. My year grades were okay, not outstanding, but okay. I didn’t get into much trouble, if any. I wasn’t disruptive. I just wasn’t interested. The only subject with which I had more than a passing acquaintance was drama. I was brilliant as one of the T-birds in Grease, singing ‘We’ll get some overhead filters and some four barrel quads, oh yeah – Grease lightning, wo-oh grease lightning’ etc., though I quite fancied having a go at John Travolta’s part, as it happens. And I was growing more and more confident that cricket would not only be my passion, it would also be my profession. So much so that when someone at school recommended I spend more time on my truly appalling French, I replied: ‘The only places I’m going to go are Australia, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Zimbabwe and West Indies. If I start speaking French in any of those places they won’t have a clue what I’m on about.’

The only thing I wanted to learn about was cricket, and not just the playing. Even at this age I was a kit bully. Unwrapping a new pair of pads or gloves, or running my hand down the blade of a new bat, was pure ecstasy for me. And, looking back, the amount of time I spent getting my gear in order and just right was downright scary. My obsession with bats and handles and grips and the like was, well, an obsession.

The runs just kept on coming, though. Still bigger than most of the other lads, still able to smash the ball harder and farther than anyone else, and still loving that feeling, I was still piling on the scores and keeping pretty well when required, for my school, for Avon Schools, for Somerset and for West of England and I was selected as one of the top 24 in the country in my age group for a national coaching course at Lilleshall. I made my first century in senior cricket, for Keynsham in the Western League in 1989, aged 14 and in 1990, after an England Schools Cricket Association trials tournament in Oxford, when England named their first-ever Under-14 squad, selected by David Lloyd among others, I was in it, alongside Andrew Flintoff and Paul Collingwood. Fred was a big boisterous bloke who could launch it miles. Colly, at that stage was an irritating dobber who bowled gentle inswing to left-handers and I whacked the living c**p out of him. If you had said to us then that, in 15 years’ time, we would be standing at The Oval drenching ourselves in Ashes champagne…

David Lloyd was impressed by my batting, less so by my size and shape, which by now was on the portly side of chubby. Unsurprising really, as my diet comprised all and only the wrong things; sausages were my favourite, hence the nickname ‘Banger’, later coined by Bob Cottam at Somerset, that has stuck with me ever since. Then, in no particular order, sausages, chips, sausages, toast, sausages, baked beans, sausages, cheese, sausages, eggs, sausages and the occasional sausage thrown in, topped off with a sprinkling of sausage. The only muscles I had in my body were around my mouth. If someone put a slice of cucumber in front of me, or any other salad item for that matter, and said ‘eat that and I’ll give you £100’, I’d say no chance. Fruit? Forget it. Vegetables? Why?

Christmas dinner in our house was a bit strange, to say the least. While everyone else would be tucking into traditional roast turkey with all the trimmings, my festive fare consisted of tinned carrots (I didn’t like the fresh ones, obviously) and a variety of potatoes, roast, boiled and mashed, which I’d stuff between slices of bread to make spud sarnies.

I cannot eat enough steak these days, but then I couldn’t stand the taste and texture of meat at all. When mum used to try and feed me meat of any kind as a toddler I would just retch or spit it out. I didn’t eat chicken until I was 20, when my Somerset teammate Rob Turner persuaded me to try a McDonald’s chicken-burger. I was so proud I rang my mum and told her, as I was washing it down with a million cans of fizzy-pop. I ate my first beef burger when I was 29. No, really. I’m not kidding.

Lloyd did mention to someone that perhaps the subject of my weight and general fitness might have to be addressed and I know it later cost me a place on the West of England Schools tour to the West Indies and possibly a place on the following year’s England Under-15 squad, but, at 14, the fact that I could hit the ball harder than seemingly anyone else my age in the entire country covered a multitude of sins. I might not have been the sprightliest in the field or between the wickets, but when you stood behind the stumps with the gloves on, and hit the ball like I did, what did I need to run for? Dad did try and take me out jogging a few times but I could barely make it to the end of our road and he soon gave it up as a bad job.

If there had been the slightest doubt about where my young life was heading, the summer of 1991 sealed my fate.

God knows how many games of cricket I played that season – for the school, for Keynsham, for West of England Schools, for Avon Schools, and, as a 15-year-old, for Somerset Under-19s under the county coach Peter Robinson, who had already bowled a million left-arm spinners to me in the freezing cold of Peter Wight’s Indoor School in Bath on Wednesday winter evenings. Sometimes I played twice in a day, a match for the club Under-17s in the morning, then an afternoon game for the 1st XI. I reckon I played more than 50 innings in all and I scored millions, including 13 hundreds and my first double. It was not enough to win selection for the England Under-15s, which hacked me right off – Phil Neville, then of Lancashire schools but later Manchester United and England, was picked ahead of me – but, by the time I began my last innings of the summer, in the last match on the last day, for Keynsham against Old Georgians, what I did know was that mum had totted up all the scores and I needed 84 runs to reach 4,000 for the season. That might be something to interest the selectors who had left me out of that England side, I reckoned.

Then the batsman’s nightmare. My sister was to-ing and fro-ing at home so we arrived late for the start of the match. All I had been thinking about was getting in early enough to give myself the best chance of making the required number of runs. But, when we arrived late and I was told we had won the toss and were already batting, that meant less chance for me. And what if the openers never got out?

Eventually I went in, but time was running out. The tension built up because everyone there knew what was at stake, and, with one ball to go in our innings I still needed two runs. I got a bottom edge on a decent yorker and groaned inwardly as the keeper parried it. I set off for the other end knowing I might be able to run a single but unless something extraordinary happened there was no way I would get two. Then, something extraordinary did happen.

Their keeper threw the ball at the stumps to try and run out my partner; he was in by miles when the ball hit the stumps and ricocheted off into the covers and I was able to scramble back for the second. I remember walking off the pitch bawling my eyes out.

And 4,000 seemed to be the magic number. Soon afterwards The Cricketer Magazine told me I had won their award for the outstanding young cricketer of the year. I duly pitched up at Lord’s to receive my award and a load of kit from Mickey Stewart, the England senior coach, Angus Fraser and Carl Hooper, who had been opponents in that summer’s Test series, and the radio commentator Brian Johnston. When he watched me in the indoor school nets at Lord’s that day Mickey made a point of querying why I hadn’t been picked for the Under-15s, and soon afterwards he made sure I was awarded a place on the MCC School of Merit training scheme there, for which I travelled up to London once a week throughout the winter, which was a wonderful consolation.

Brian Johnston’s behaviour that day was magnificently eccentric. Johnners had an absolute obsession about the Australian soap opera Neighbours. Wherever he was, if Neighbours was on the telly he had to watch it. Everything stopped for Ramsay Street. And there and then, as we were settling down to a buffet reception after the awards had been completed, Johnners set up a portable TV in the corner of the room and switched it on for his daily dose of Kylie, Jason and Madge.

After all that, then scoring heavily for Somerset Under-19s, including an unbeaten 158 against Warwickshire, followed by a 2nd XI appearance, sitting my GCSEs in the summer of 1992 seemed somewhat beside the point. Bob Cottam, the Director of Cricket at Somerset, and Peter Robinson, the coach had already indicated they would be interested in signing me. The headmaster at Sir Bernard Lovell recommended I should turn them down and go back for A-levels, but, as I’d managed the sum total of one pass in my GCSEs, a ‘B’, in Drama, I can only think he must have spotted something in me no one else had done thus far. I told him, politely, that I could get an education at any age but I would only get one chance at cricket. There was talk of me enrolling at Bath Technical College to do a sports training course or some such, but when it became clear the only thing I wanted to do for a living was play cricket, mum sat me down and said: ‘Right, well, if you’re going to play cricket, do it properly. That means you’ve got to knuckle down and train and do everything you have to.’

Just before the end of my academic career I received news that I had been selected for the England Under-17s, to play three Tests against South Africa in July and August, and, only a few days after I left school, aged 16 and a half, dad received a hand-written letter from the Somerset secretary Peter Anderson, confirming that they wanted me to join them, as of 17 August, on a contract that would see me through until 1994.

‘The salary level is in line with that of other junior players,’ he wrote.

‘There is a minimum wage agreement but that does not come into force until a player has two years’ service. I think that with accommodation paid for plus allowances on match days, it is not too bad for youngsters. However, should you wish to discuss this or any other matter, please give me a ring.

‘We are very happy that Marcus wishes to join us. He will have a lot to do and learn, of course, but at least he now has a chance to realize his ambition.’

I can’t actually remember how much they offered me to start off with. I’ve got a vague recollection of £100 per week plus accommodation. Then £3,000 for 1993 and £3,300 for ’94. It sounded and felt like a king’s ransom.

In any case, I would have paid them.