Sporting life
Taking a break
by Michael Brearley
ILLUSTRATIONS BY CLARA NICOLL
In my book Turning Over the Pebbles: A Life in Cricket and in the Mind, I quote the American psychoanalyst Salman Akhtar’s response to a question about whether a person who has been helped by treatment for his emotional difficulties could be indistinguishable from a person who never had them. Akhtar offered an analogy: imagine, he says, two beautiful vases on a shelf. A wind gets up and blows one off. That vase cracks into pieces. It is carefully and skilfully put back together so that it looks almost identical to the one that didn’t get blown off, but has traces of cracks. But this vase knows something that the other vase doesn’t know. It knows what it is to go through difficulties and recover.
I have often wondered whether the analogy applies to sportspeople like me, who took time out from professional sport in order to pursue other things. Would I have been better at cricket had I not taken several years out in my twenties? Did cracks in my technique develop that needed repairing? Or did taking my path enable other strengths to emerge that would not have done so without this interruption?