Think back to that team and Jonathan Trott was always the relatable one. Get past the gnarly ones, the Type A personalities and the one-offs, and you’d arrive at him, the everyman stumbling in a little late, sporting a dual passport and a receding hairline, who became an integral part of an almost-conquering Test side and briefly one of the best players in the world, before the team, and the man, fell apart.
For four blissful years Trott was there for all the big moments. The dreamlike debut at The Oval in 2009, only the seventh English batter to make an Ashes ton on debut, sealing a 2-1 win. The overseas wins in Australia and India. The ascension to No 1 team in the world. It couldn’t last and it didn’t. But what a ride.
Cult status was assured in Australia in 2010, with a series of typically Trott-like incisions under the skin of their itchy hosts. It was Trott, from the unfashionable position at square leg, who nailed the direct hit to run out Simon Katich in the opening over of the Adelaide Test. And it was Trott again at Melbourne, on 168 not out, leaving his mark in a literal sense: after running out of partners, with England’s lead at 415, he stood alone in the middle, head down and still scratching out his guard as the Australians traipsed off the field.
The act would have been seen as a provocation from most cricketers, but Trott’s self-absorption, his cocoon-like qualities and mild eccentricities, were already legendary. In the good times, his bubble acted as a force field to such an extent that even today, when critics of the current English side go searching for a stylistic counterpoint, it’s to Trott that they often return. Indeed, in recent weeks, Trott has been a regular talking point, and not just as a handy exemplar of how things used to be. When the betting companies rushed out their post-Sydney media releases, Trott was near the top of every list to succeed Brendon McCullum as head coach.
Watching the series from his home in Birmingham brought back some choice memories. After the rare joys of his first Ashes tour, Trott’s second assignment, 2013-14, turned into a collective nightmare. The tour shouldn’t have happened in the first place, he says. The teams had just played five matches against each other in England, then a full one-day international series, and yet a couple of months later they were gearing up to go again. “That sort of broke us,” he says. “It was ridiculous.” In Australia, things fell to ruin. An ageing team had grown sick of each other, and no one could stop the implosion. The lowest moment came after the first Test, when news came through that Trott had been forced to leave the tour prematurely with a stress-related illness.
As one of those gathered to hear Andy Flower lament the loss of his “rock”, and to plead with bloodshot eyes for clemency from a feverish media, I remember thinking how uniquely merciless the game of cricket could be. And this, 12 years on, is instinctively where Trott retreats to now. Four straight years as a Test cricketer in a hyper-intense setup and three as Afghanistan’s head coach have sharpened his emotional intelligence to a point where the abstractions of success and failure are inadequate routes to the truth.
“I’ll never forget how tough it can be as a country,” Trott says of Australia. “It’s very unforgiving. You can see it. I’ve sat in the stands, sat in the change room, played in the middle. I feel for the guys. And that’s something I’ll always have as a coach, because I’ll always know how difficult the game is.”
Empathy is critical, he says. Without it, players will struggle to relate to him, and him to them. A shared feeling for the game’s essential brutishness is useful. He returns to the plight of the Test team. “So, times are tough, and obviously you need to be honest and upfront and all that sort of stuff. But also, sometimes it just doesn’t go your way. And you know, they’re getting a lot of stick for stuff that’s … Australia have been pretty good as well. We forget that.”
Trott always has been a player’s player: a man more at ease in dressing rooms than boardrooms, whose indifference to the media game doesn’t mean he’s not expansive and engaging when drawn out. He is no apologist for England’s Ashes campaign. He has a few thoughts, of a kind he would rather not air too loudly. He doesn’t want to give them any ammo, he says with a wink, knowing that his Afghanistan team may come up against England some time soon. But it’s not just that. It’s the pile-on. The public flogging, the open season. It bothers him. Especially when it comes from ex-players who he feels should know better.
“It annoys me when I see people throwing darts when they don’t know exactly what they’re throwing at,” he says, emphasising that he wants to be quoted on this. “I find it incredibly hard when I watch these ex-England cricketers on TV biting the hand that fed them. And sometimes I go, ‘Oh, maybe you’ve forgotten how tough it was? You must have forgotten about that time, because I haven’t. I remember.’ I have a huge thing about ex-players doing that.”
He remains deeply tied up in the fabric of the culture. We are talking the morning after Jacob Bethell’s night before. The former Warwickshire man is effusive about his heir at first drop but he talks not of the boy’s strokeplay, because that stuff’s a given, but his character. “For Jacob, it’s amazing. To make your first first-class hundred and to do it in Australia, he’s done things his own way, and it’s brilliant. It’s dynamic, and he’s a bit of a maverick, and the team needs these guys to stand up like that. It shows a lot of character. Very early on, you can see things in a player who’s got it and who doesn’t have it, and obviously Jacob’s got it in abundance.” It is only natural to imagine how good a mentor Trott could be for a player such as Bethell.
For now, he has a job to do with Afghanistan. He’s contracted until the end of the T20 World Cup, and the indications are that they will shake hands after that. They’re in a tough group, but that was also the case two years ago, when they clattered past Australia on their way to a last-four defeat to South Africa. And, of course, they tend to dump on England in every tournament they play.
“The side is at a point now where it’s learning how to deal with the expectations from the outside world,” he says. The talent, untrammelled when he first took over, is no longer so raw. “There was so much of it, but it was a little bit all over the place. So I’ve just tried to add a little bit of structure. And with that structure brings a little bit of clarity of where we’re trying to go as a side. The biggest thing is for them to just believe in themselves.”
Evolving the team’s identity from rascally underdogs to hardened competitors has been one of Trott’s toughest challenges, in a role with a fair few to choose from. For one thing, he has still never set foot in the country; the team traverses the region without ever meeting up in the land they represent. For reasons of self-preservation as much as anything else, they have a rule: no politics in the dressing room.
He tries to “shelter” his players from the machinations at board level, knowing how tightly that board will be tangled up with the country’s current ruling force, and applauds the stance of certain members of his team in standing in solidarity with their exiled female counterparts as best they can. “They are very brave,” he says. “What they’ve said on social media when things have happened, you just have to go through their profiles and you’ll be able to see, you know? I don’t think anybody will ever know fully how much they’re putting themselves at risk with regards to whatever they say.”
In a tinderbox region, run by a regime that once banned cricket but which now seems intent on mining its sportswashing potential, the team exists in a state of perpetual threat. “They’ve got this amazing resilience,” he says, “from where they’ve come from.” The counterpoint to his own experiences as a “westerner” cricketer, going to what he calls the best school in South Africa before transferring to one of the great county clubs, has opened his mind to the sheer breadth and scale of the game. Some of his players can’t read, while an in-house interpreter bridges the language barrier. His body language has to be right, he says, and his messaging crystal. You sense that Trott has relished being wrenched out of his lane.
And what of his own future, then? It’s a mark of his honesty, his chipper bluntness, that he barrels into the subtext to arrive at an answer both obvious and surprising. Yeah, sure, in an ideal world, should the Afghanistan adventure come to a close, he would like to stay in international cricket. He enjoys the pressure, the responsibility, and all the stuff that goes with being a head coach. He pauses for a moment, considering leaving it alone. It’s not his style.
“But yeah, obviously, I’d love to coach – you know. I’m not gonna lie. I’d love to coach England one day. Definitely. There’s a few things I’d like to achieve with England.”
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