“It was like I was on a train that I knew was going to crash,” Nick Compton says as he describes how he struggled with his mental health during the last few years of his cricket career. “I could get off at the next station or I could stay on this train, which had a faulty wheel. But if I got out at the station would another train come? There was no guarantee, so I thought: ‘Fuck this, I’m staying on it.’ But I knew the crash was coming.”
Compton played 16 Tests for England between 2012 and 2016, scored two centuries, enjoyed an average opening partnership of 54 with Alastair Cook and won four of the five series he played in, including India and South Africa away. He also scored 12,168 first-class runs at an average of 40.42 and, as the grandson of Denis Compton, his name belongs in the pantheon of English cricket.
But when the inevitable crash came for a cricketer whose grit could never quite mask his complex fragility, Compton “felt like a guy holding on to a cliff with five fingers, four fingers, three fingers, then by my nails because I didn’t want to let go of something that meant everything to me. I was in a pretty bad way.”
On a Monday morning, during a fevered Ashes series, the usually genteel neighbourhood of Holland Park in London sounds like New York on a fraught day. The traffic is incessant, pneumatic drills dig up the street and the binmen collect another week of rubbish. Compton and I escape to a noisy cafe and do the bulk of this interview sitting on the pavement down a sidestreet. The quiet allows Compton to reflect on his past, which stretches from Durban to Lord’s, from a sister struggling with paralysis and drug addiction to the intensity of Test cricket.
Compton has written a powerful and moving book, dominated by his obsession with cricket and the emotional difficulties he faced. The lessons it offers seem timely and resonant against the backdrop of this fractious series between England and Australia. It is also instructive to hear Compton’s trenchant views on Bazball, his admiration for another outsider who suffered from depression in Ben Stokes and how previous England regimes lacked such empathy.
The book opens with Compton batting at Lord’s against Sri Lanka in June 2016. Compton felt close to a breakdown after years of dredging up the reserves of will on which his entire career had been built. “My brain had gone and I wanted to walk off the ground,” he writes. “The runaway train had finally come off the tracks.”
Compton was out for one in that first innings and never played for England again, but, as he stresses now, he had already been troubled at Middlesex. “I was fielding in a one-day game and thought: ‘I can’t be here any more.’ Another voice in my head was saying: ‘What’s wrong with you? Sort yourself out.’ I ran off the field, went up to the physio room and started crying. I’d told them I needed the toilet but I knew something was wrong.”
Having turned 40 last month, Compton is finally in a position to make sense of a smothering fixation with cricket that left him contemplating suicide in his darkest moments. As a boy in South Africa, he says, “I was definitely obsessive. Life and death to me was whether I was going to be [the all-rounder] Jacques Kallis. Was I going to achieve some of the things my grandad did? That single-mindedness made life narrow and difficult.
“I was bullied quite heavily at school. People misunderstood me because I was this kid with blond hair who seemed to win everything. There were natural jealousies but, on the inside, I was fragile and vulnerable. Some kids have little dolls or blankets they cling on to or suck at night. My comfort blanket was a cricket bat. Whether I’d been crying or been bullied I thought: ‘I’ll show people I’m going to make it.’”
By any reasonable standard Compton did well as an international cricketer, having moved to England as a teenager when he was offered a scholarship at Harrow. But he still lives with regret and the fear his career “reeks of failure because I didn’t achieve what I expected”. Compton and Cook remain, statistically, the fourth-best opening partnership in England Test history and, with better management, he could have been even more successful.
But there is great pain in Compton’s story for his sister, Alex, who tried to escape her drug addiction in 2007 by attempting to take her life. She ended up paralysed from the waist down. Compton sometimes blamed himself because he was away in England and while understanding how his parents emotionally supported Alex he felt her addiction could have been handled differently.
Meanwhile, his own ambition became a form of torture as he measured success and failure in the scores he laboriously compiled at the crease. Compton smiles ruefully when I say he must have been in desperate need of the nourishing elements of Bazball – where Stokes and Brendon McCullum insist that enjoyment and self-expression should curb any fear of failure. “What’s been so impressive about Stokes and McCullum is that they’re very interested in the people in their team and they will back them through thick and thin,” he says. “It looks a safe environment from an emotional perspective.”
But Compton has not lost his competitive edge and after watching England fritter away wickets on the third day of the second Ashes Test at Lord’s he is scathing about the fuzzier aspects of Bazball. “They keep talking about the entertainment factor and you think: ‘Yeah, the entertainment’s good, the aggression’s good.’ But, fundamentally, it’s not that entertaining losing. If you keep squandering good opportunities it goes from entertainment to stupidity.
“Australia are a very good, experienced team who do everything pretty well. So you can’t lose six wickets for 46 runs like England did. They had a massive opportunity to rub the Aussie bowlers in the dirt but you can’t give away your wickets in ways which are blase or even a bit arrogant. When I played for England under Andy Flower and Graham Gooch, it was all about getting 400 in the first innings. If you did that you’re not guaranteed a win but you’re certainly taking yourselves further away from losing a Test.”
Flower, who was in charge during the first part of Compton’s England career, represented the antithesis of Bazball. “Andy was tough and I definitely responded to people with that toughness,” Compton says. “If I’d had longer to build a relationship with him he could have seen me as somebody made of the right stuff.”
But Compton felt he had to say “what Andy and the ECB liked to hear – that you know what you’re doing and you act like a robot rather than a human being who needed reassurance or help along the way.”
Honesty in elite sport can be misinterpreted as weakness and Compton was cast aside when he told Flower he was too injured to field for England. “I looked him in the eye and said: ‘Andy, I’m 30 years old and I’m telling you I cannot field.’ He went: ‘Right.’ I knew I’d never play for him again but, even if I was out of confidence and struggling, I still had integrity. I’d never missed a game through injury. But when KP [Kevin Pietersen] told me they said I had faked an injury it was like being buried alive.”
Stokes has generated a different atmosphere. “When I first played with Stokes I thought he was a Botham or Flintoff-style player who would go out, whack it and have a beer,” Compton says. “But there was a real intensity to him. He was a studious observer of the game who spent hours on the computer looking at his technique.
“On the face of it we were brought up very differently. I went to Harrow and don’t have any tattoos, but I was a pretty down-to-earth South African who wanted to play sport. He was brought up in New Zealand and had a dad as tough as nails. We both suffered with depression but we’re fighters. For me, it was about giving the bowler no inch. For him, it’s about taking on the bowler. But there’s a lot about his play that isn’t just whacking it.”
We’re still sitting on the pavement and getting curious looks from the well-heeled residents. But Compton doesn’t notice as he talks intently:
“People who have something different about them are worth the bother. They’re worth investing in, they’re worth understanding because individual thinkers give some magic. Ben Stokes has been worth the bother. I’m not comparing myself to Stokes but he came with some problems. He’s been very frank that he could have been in jail but look at the transformation and look at the backing. In my experience, it was easier for those different people to be pushed away.”
Compton felt like an outsider as a cricketer whose extreme sensitivity was misunderstood, but that point of difference could define him in his new career as a photographer. When he played for England in India he would slip out of his hotel to photograph people in the street and he felt a warmth and affinity with those strangers he never really shared with his teammates.
Those attributes will help him creatively and could enhance his work in another career option – as a mentor to younger players with whom he shares the hard lessons accrued over the years. When he played at Lord’s he often looked up at the stand named after his grandfather. Denis Compton was an extraordinarily gifted batter who played with freedom and panache. His grandson defended his wicket like a limpet clinging to the rocks and while Denis admired Nick’s fight he once shouted at him in the garden. “I was blocking the ball perfectly,” Compton recalls, “and grandad, who was drinking his gin and tonic, yelled: ‘For heaven’s sake, hit the bloody thing.’”
Compton laughs and the heartache recedes further. He had been medicated for depression since he was 13 but “I have weaned myself off them”. We talk about the differences between “the old Nick and the new Nick” – as well as their recurring similarities. Compton is not free from all his past demons but, as he accepts that “my flaws are the strengths of this story”, he seems lighter.
“I’m proud of my identity as a Test cricketer but I want to find a new focus so if I come back into cricket it will be with a deeper perspective,” he says as we begin to walk again. “I’ve not had the simplest path but I’ve got a lot to offer and I’m entering a different phase of my life with more purpose to contribute to the development of others. I also want to tell my story and help those in positions of power to understand that people who seem difficult or complex are worth the bother. We deserve to be understood.”
Legacy by Nick Compton is published by Allen and Unwin
• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
