Cricket Helpline Call Log

November 13, 2.43pm GMT: Request for help from highly distressed player complaining about crowd abuse during the warm-up matches in Australia. There hadn’t been any.

Caller explained that, in several days of fielding, the abuse he had suffered had been either non-existent or so lame as to beggar description. Caller quoted Oscar Wilde to the effect that there was only one thing worse than being on the end of a chippy mouthful from beered-up Aussies, and that was not being on the end of a chippy mouthful from beered-up Aussies.

In the absence of the expected response, the caller, who regularly took up boundary positions, had begun to question the entire point of his being there.

Therapist diagnosed insecurity, coupled with low-level depression arising from disappointed expectations. Caller was asked to contextualise the issue and re-centre the problem, not on himself but on the Australian crowd, who had taken the loss of the Ashes in 2005 very hard and had yet to recover their traditional buoyancy.

Therapist then ran through the received strategies for instigating crowd reaction in its natural absence — exaggerated crotch-fondling in the spectators’ direction, hand gestures formed by the fielder behind his back, etc. Caller urged to ring back for further advice if none of this worked.

Call duration: 15min 23sec

November 17, 11.05am: Caller, who sounded extremely low, maintained that everyone in his team’s dressing-room was either reading, or had read, The Da Vinci Code and that, moreover, everyone was of the opinion that it was brilliant.

The caller, on the other hand, didn’t get it at all, found the book to be a complete wet sock and was struggling to move beyond page 23. Caller claimed that his failure to connect in any way with Dan Brown’s international bestseller was inducing feelings of alienation, detachment and, ultimately, inadequacy.

Therapist emphasised that the ability to form literary tastes beyond, and in spite of, the consensus could be celebrated as a strength of mind and character in a cricketer, rather than experienced as a weakness.

In fact, if sufficiently confident in his view, the caller could assume a kind of moral responsibility to lead a dressing-room revolt against The Da Vinci Code, pointing out the utter feebleness of its prose and structure and persuading the book’s adherents, by careful literary argument, of the wrong-headedness of their view.

Alternatively, the option was always there to set the book aside and ask for a loan of Kevin Pietersen’s Nuts.

Call duration: 8min 45sec