60 2GM Thursday October 15 2020 | the times
SportCricket
An elite club
Ambrose is one of just 15 players to
have scored a Test century as an
England wicketkeeperLes Ames
(1929-39)
Matt Prior
(2007-14)
Alec Stewart
(1990-2003)
Jonny Bairstow
(2013- )
Alan Knott
(1967-81)
Godfrey Evans
(1946-59)
Jim Parks
(1960-68)
Jack Russell
(1988-98)
Tim Ambrose
(2008-09)
Jos Buttler
(2014-)
Ben Foakes
(2018- )
Geraint Jones
(2004-06)
John Murray
(1961-67)
Jack Richards
(1986-88)
Henry Wood
(1888-92)8 7 6 5 5 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Ambrose scored a century in his
second Test and then spent the past
decade as Warwickshire keeper, leftnow but it really did stick with me.
Someone got through to me and
reminded me that we were in this
amazing position to be able to bring
joy to people, to bring moments to
people that they loved and cherished.
“I’d lost sight of it along the way
and that voice reminded me instantly
that I was in an incredibly privileged
position, lucky to be doing it and
what I was doing by playing but not
really being engaged with it, not
speaking, going home and not
sleeping and not doing my job very
well, just wasn’t good enough for the
people watching us.
“It reminded me that people care.
I’d seen it when I won the
championship with Sussex early in
my career, the first Sussex team to do
it in 170-odd years, seeing grown men
cry, but I was too young to realise
what it meant because at that stage I
was just going out and enjoying the
game. Later on I came to understand
it and it made me take my
responsibilities a bit more seriously.”
So with the help of friends,
professionals, medication and a
stranger’s voice coming out of the fog,“I was way down a hole, locked in
my room, couldn’t do anything,
useless, and when I decided to do
something about it I didn’t really
have anyone to talk to initially, until
I reconnected with someone who had
talked to us at the club a year or two
earlier. Now there’s a lot more
openness and help.
“It’s not an uncommon story. When
[my England career] ended I went
from this very narrow view to this
huge, wide picture of the world and I
had no idea of how I belonged and
where I fitted in and I just felt very
ill-equipped to deal with it all. In my
head I had given up the sport and the
idea of ever playing cricket again just
seemed ludicrous for a while, so to get
ten more years out of it... ”
In his retirement statement,
Ambrose made mention of one
Warwickshire member, unknown to
him, whose voice he recalled, as if
coming out of a haze during one of
his lowest points. How, returning
from the middle after another low
score, he heard this voice say: “Don’t
worry, Tim, we’re all behind you.”
“It sounds quite symbolic and strangeT
im Ambrose remembers
waiting by the carousel at
Heathrow. He had come
home a little early from
England’s tour to the
Caribbean in 2009, having played
what turned out to be his last Test,
and as he stood waiting for his bags to
come around, waiting and waiting
and waiting, with his mind whirring
and whirring and whirring, he
became increasingly agitated.
“I was getting angrier waiting for
this bag,” he says. “I just couldn’t
believe it was happening. I eventually
got it and I remember thinking:
‘What is wrong with you?’ Normally
with England you get pushed on to a
bus and they give you your room key
and then you get a knock on the door
and your bags are outside. I’d been
living this life for 18 months or so and
suddenly this absolutely normal thing
like picking your bag off the carousel,
something that I’d done all my life,
seemed incredibly inconvenient.
“I remember thinking: ‘You’ve got
to have a look at yourself. I think
you’ve turned into someone that you
probably wouldn’t like very much.’ So
that was a bit of a wake-up call.”
What followed eventually was a
bleak period, then some time out of
the game having had a diagnosis of
depression, followed by a joyful
return and a second grab at a career
which was more blessed than the
first, despite the absence of
international recognition.
There will be many cricketers lost
to the game this winter as counties
make hard financial decisions,
although a small proportion have
retired of their own accord. After two
decades, Ambrose, 37, is one of that
number. He has experienced the best
that the sport has to offer and the
worst (the two being linked to some
degree) and he has emerged
impressively clear-eyed, self-aware
and grounded, with a refreshing
awareness of life outside of the
sporting bubble and absolutely
grateful for everything cricket has
thrown at him.
Ambrose came to England from
Australia as a teenager and has been
here ever since. He played for Sussex,
between 2001 to 2005, and then
Warwickshire. He is one of only
two Warwickshire wicketkeepers to
have taken more than 1,000 career
dismissals, has won every domestic
trophy and played 11 Tests for
England, scoring a memorable
hundred in his second game at
Wellington. It has been a fine career.
But the trophies and all the runs,
catches and stumpings do not tell of
his greatest achievement which, he
maintains, was coming back from a
bout of mental illness in 2010, shortly
after his brief England career came to
an end. Coming back from but not
overcoming completely, given the
medication he still takes to control
things. He recently tried coming offthe antidepressants and it did not go
well. “The world is a little bit upside
down, isn’t it, and it’s easy to get
knocked off kilter,” he says.
We are ahead of ourselves, a little.
Newly arrived as a teenager from
New South Wales, and given a go
with Sussex, cricket and life seemed
simple. Not easy, but simple in the
steady grip of his ambition. “I was
successful early on, naive in a good
way, and I wasn’t fazed by anything.
I really didn’t think too much about
consequences or outcomes.
“I had a very clear goal to play
international sport. I wanted to pay
back all the people who had believed
in me and helped me along the way.
So those first five or six years were all
about playing for England. That was
my sole focus and it helped dealing
with the bad days or any situation
because I knew what my goal was.
It served me very well to be focused
and single-minded.”
Then came the day, at Hamilton in
March 2008, when that dream
became a reality. He looks back on it
as one of the greatest days of his life.
“My whole family was there, my
sisters and my parents. It was the first
time my mum had ever seen me play
cricket because she was always too
nervous. I had some schoolfriendscameras were on me, and the whole
Barmy Army’s there for the first ball,
which is not particularly usual, so it
sort of hit me then: ‘Don’t f*** this
up,’ is all I could think.
“And you spent all those years as a
kid, practising for hours throwing a
ball against the back wall, dreaming
of a Test hundred and that moment
when I got my own, which eventually
was with a nervous nick through the
slips, the only thing I felt was relief.
Thank God I didn’t f*** it up.
“I don’t think I ever felt quite
comfortable within myself in the
team and in the system. And maybe
it didn’t quite suit the way I enjoy
cricket; there was an emphasis to
make sure you are taking care of
your game and that’s the best thing
you can do for the team, most of the
time, and that’s the best way you can
stay in it as well. And I found that
that sort of didn’t quite fit with
what I expected.
“Maybe I just wasn’t quite good
enough to play at that level for a long
period, and I’m absolutely fine with
that now. At the time it was a hard
thing to get my head around, but the
reason I wanted to play was to find
out and maybe the answer was that I
wasn’t quite good enough, and that’s
OK. I got to find that out, and a lot of
people don’t. So I’m prouder of the
fact that I got to find that out than
I’ve got a Test hundred.
“I was slightly changing — the
story at the airport came afterwards
— and I was becoming something
that I didn’t like. I was sort of
teetering in a strange place and that
wasn’t a great path to go down.”
Like so many who realise a lifelong
ambition, he found the emptiness
of what came afterwards hard to
cope with.
“I had completely lost my focus
as to why I was playing cricket.
I’d had a very clear goal
and then it wasn’t there
anymore.”
The path led to a dark place,
where he played cricket in a sort
of fog, not realising that he was
in no state to be playing at all.
“I took about 12 to 14
months out of life really
to try to work things
out, to try to fix things.
That was my biggest
challenge by a
distance and that
was the achievement
I’m most proud of.
To turn my life
around from where
it was... it was
such a difficult,
difficult time; it
was like having
to climb
the north
face every
morning. I
thought I was never going
to play again.‘I was in lonely, dark
place. Fixing myself
beat Test hundred’
Recently retired wicketkeeper Tim Ambrose tells Mike Atherton about
depression, self-loathing as an England player and kindness of fans
“
If I hadn’t gone through
difficult experiences, I
might have drifted, being
bitter about England
there that I hadn’t seen for a long
time and it was everything I’d
dreamt about as a kid. I really
treasure that moment.”
He harbours no regrets or
bitterness about his time with
England, but it proved to be an
underwhelming experience
thereafter. “I realised that I
wasn’t quite built for that
environment and it
didn’t quite live up to
what you dream up in
your head and you
spent so long
imagining.
“In the second
Test when I got my
hundred I was 97
or 98 not out
overnight,
something like
that. I remember
going in, quite
pleased with
myself, and
then the next
morning coming
out and realising
that all the