WITHIN minutes of his first-ball dismissal at the Rose Bowl in Southampton on Tuesday, Marcus Trescothick stood alone with his thoughts at the top of the steps by the England dressing-room. He once described his biggest fear as being stranded alone at sea by night and this was a picture of a man in the same state of isolation.

Trescothick is an uncomplicated batsman who has developed a straightforward method that works most of the time. Life away from the sport is followed with the same lack of ostentation. In the nicest way, he is a simple man with simple pleasures. His hobby just happens to be his job.

Trescothick enjoys batting more than any of his England colleagues. But the unfortunate corollary can be the depressing effect of low scores. It is not getting out that bothers him, because Trescothick recognises this occupational hazard. He struggles when he cannot work out why.

Arriving at Somerset as a 17-year-old with a brilliant schoolboy record, he had made his representative debut at 7 for the Avon under-11 side and was playing regular first-team cricket for his home club, Keynsham, at 14. He frequently won prizes for high scoring in a monthly competition run by the Cricketer magazine.

Dominant teenagers do not always fulfil their potential. When they begin to struggle in the professional game, they lack the experience of responding to failure. Some never learn how to cope and in the mid-1990s it seemed that Trescothick had hit this psychological barrier.

He was known to cry in the dressing-room and even now suffers sleepless nights when his form has deserted him, often at the end of long winter programmes. Asked a couple of years ago whether he had any regrets, he replied: “There are 101 shots I would have played differently.”

His stroke of luck came in 1999, when he scored 167 out of a Somerset total of 280, with 25 fours and five sixes, one of them rebounding off a tombstone in a churchyard next to the Taunton ground. The opponents happened to be Glamorgan, who were coached by Duncan Fletcher at the time, on notice before joining England.

Within a year, Trescothick was opening the batting for his country. Behind the scenes, a friend since the age of 3, Eddie Gregg, was dying from leukaemia. Trescothick dedicated his first England hundred to his absent friend.

There is no doubt that Fletcher has retained a soft spot for Trescothick and the player said before the revelations yesterday that, in a time of career crisis, he would turn to Fletcher for support. At one point it seemed that he would serve his mentor as full-time England captain.

Then, shortly before Nasser Hussain resigned in 2003, Trescothick lost his enjoyment of the game for the first time. “I want to get cricket out of my system,” he said. “I want to eat and drink so much that I turn into a fat b****** and sleep for a year.”

Hussain felt that Trescothick was simply too nice for the job, lacking Michael Vaughan’s edge. He is an assiduous trainer and has needed to be to control a hearty appetite. At 15 he was left out of a West of England tour on the ground of fitness, while the nickname “Banger” was acquired within a week of joining Somerset. On an England Under-19 trip to Sri Lanka he supposedly dined at Pizza Hut every night for six weeks.

Through all of his England duties, Trescothick’s heart has stayed in the West Country. His parents run a clothing firm in Bristol and his wife, Hayley, is from the same area. They married in January 2004 and live near Taunton. Their daughter, Ellie, was born in May last year.

Last November he considered leaving the Pakistan tour when his father-in-law, John, suffered serious head injuries after falling off a ladder at home. Trescothick was put through the distressing experience of watching CCTV footage of the accident via his mobile phone. It is easy now to imagine that as a turning point.