Mark Broadhurst is ready to talk

NICK FRIEND: Mark Broadhurst had it all as a seamer for England Under-19s. Then came the yips. He became depressed, almost lost a leg in trying to salvage his bowling and fled the country to escape cricket. For the first time, this is his story

As a naturally gifted teenage fast bowler, Mark Broadhurst had it all. And if things had turned out differently, you might already know his name.

Instead, his short career as a professional cricketer spanned seven games and threatened to ruin his life.

But now, he is ready to talk. He has never put any of this into the public domain before. Until this point, he had hidden the damage caused by his experiences of living out a childhood dream.

It is the story of how his struggles as a youngster initiated a battle with the yips that, at its worst, almost saw him lose a leg – and led him into a downward spiral of desolation.

As he lost control of his life, he fought depression, and was diagnosed with skin cancer – from which he has recovered – and a chronic autoimmune disease, opting to flee the country in a bid to escape the demons that he first encountered as a promising tearaway in the second team of Yorkshire, his home county. “I do believe that the stress of what happened contributed to me developing those illnesses,” he says. “I’m still here though.”

This interview is happening at this juncture because Broadhurst, now 46, feels confident enough to share his cautionary, agonising tale. He displayed that courage in commenting on Facebook – something he finds cathartic – with a brief outline of his story in response to a recent interview by The Cricketer with Barney Gibson, England’s youngest-ever first-class cricketer, who retired aged 19 citing a thirst for freedom. There are few parallels between them, but Broadhurst felt a certain resonance – perhaps in how they both came to fall out of love with the game and also their shared youth on debut: he became Yorkshire’s third-youngest player when he faced Oxford University in 1991 at 16, a year older than Gibson in 2011.

“It affected my life for so long,” says Broadhurst. “I spoke to my mum about it and asked if I should let sleeping dogs lie. But I’ve got to a stage now where maybe I can help young people.”

In recent times, he has started to follow cricket once again, reading articles and watching games without the reluctance that dominated him as he sought to piece himself back together.

Because, between 1994 and 2001, everything caved in. “I felt completely worthless,” he admits. “I’d absolutely gone. As a person, the black hole had started to form.”

^{Broadhurst (standing, second from right) was part of the English Schools Cricket Association XI at under-15 level and went on to star for England Under-19s}

Three years after his final England Under-19s appearance, he was working in a warehouse, broken by the game he loved.

“I’m lucky something really bad didn’t happen to me during that period of devastation.”

Until it all went wrong, he had been a regular through England age-group teams, starring in under-19 sides with Michael Vaughan, Ronnie Irani, Mark Butcher, John Crawley, Glen Chapple and Matt Walker. In a golden era, he came up against Adam Gilchrist, Damien Martyn, Stephen Fleming, Nathan Astle, Chaminda Vaas and Shivnarine Chanderpaul. And he stood out.

In all, he featured in 13 youth Tests, playing three years above his age on his first tour. A coach from that period believed Broadhurst “was someone who could go on to play for England”. A former teammate at national level through their teens remembers a huge talent with the world at his feet: “He was the real deal. He was genuinely quick, he bowled fast and straight, he had a great attitude, he was fit as a fiddle.”

And for the most part, that was where he was happiest and where he forged his reputation as a potentially generational prodigy.

“Any time I went away with England Under-19s, it was like being released from prison,” says Broadhurst. “They’d let you express yourself, they believed in you and my performances showed that. I was a different person and a different bowler. It was like a release. I just felt a different lad – not as scared, not as threatened.”

A release, he explains, from his experience at Yorkshire. He recalls his teenage self in the early 1990s: perhaps naïve and “gullible”, certainly dedicated and innocent without agenda, but thrust into an environment in which he was rarely comfortable.

He believes his treatment was harsh, though also appreciates that in his era it might have been considered tough love. What he knows for sure is the impact it had on him.

“With that regime, it was as if they were trying to toughen me up,” he says. “By doing so, they were just destroying my spirit. Sometimes I didn’t help myself, don’t get me wrong. But when I look back, some of the situations that they put me in were just extraordinary – you couldn’t make it up.”

^{Broadhurst joined Kent in 1999 but retired from the sport shortly afterwards, unable to deal with his mental health at the time}

He views one incident in 1992 as the beginning of the end for his Yorkshire career. On a high after taking five wickets in an under-19 Test against Sri Lanka at Headingley in front of his watching Yorkshire coaches, he felt like they blanked him as he left the field. He was then dropped for the subsequent county second-team match despite being their leading wicket-taker.

He says: “They accused me of not bowling well enough – I’d just taken five wickets in a Test for England Under-19s. They said that my diet was poor, when I was one of the lads who didn’t drink half as much as anyone else. I don’t know what they were trying to do to me.”

He was told to report for academy training the next morning. Only, upon arrival, he was instructed to unpack a lorryload of temporary seating ahead of an upcoming Test match.

“I thought: ‘This is just insane: I’m being paid to play cricket, I’m bowling well.’ I went up to the academy coach and said I wasn’t going to do this. He basically said: ‘Well, piss off then.’”

It was not completely uncommon for young players to be instructed with such tasks almost 30 years ago and it might not seem like a career-changing anecdote, but the episode left a major scar.

“From the lad who joined Yorkshire, I was never the same kid again,” he reflects. “It completely changed me. I just hated playing for Yorkshire.”

He found the second-team culture most difficult: when Broadhurst was one of four players allocated a sponsored car, animosity followed. “Some of the older pros in the second team didn’t like it,” he says. He preferred the atmosphere of the first team, and he speaks highly of Darren Gough, Peter Hartley and Phil Carrick among the teammates who encouraged him as a gifted teenager.

In his fleeting appearances – five in first-class cricket, one in the Sunday League – he displayed his significant potential. At 17, he took three wickets against the touring Sri Lankans and, after bowling fast on a pre-season tour of South Africa in 1993, he was picked to face Cambridge University but tore an intercostal muscle just seven balls in. All this, still as an 18-year-old who had joined the club on a full-time basis following his GCSEs.

"It's awful when something that came so easily when you were young feels like it's taken away from you. The yips is like being struck down with paralysis. It was like a bereavement, really"

“I wasn’t streetwise and I wasn’t brash; I had talent and I just needed nurturing,” he says. “I suppose I was a complex character – I thought a bit deeply, but I was a nice lad who just needed an arm around the shoulder.

“Some people might say they loved it but there are many who I’ve spoken to who didn’t. For me, it was just an awful environment.”

When approached by The Cricketer with Broadhurst’s story, Yorkshire responded with the following statement: “We are very sorry to read of Mark’s experiences from nearly 30 years ago and acknowledge that this must have been a distressing time for Mark. Players who have represented Yorkshire at all levels are always welcome back to Emerald Headingley.”

By 1994, the yips had begun to engulf Broadhurst, and he recalls feeling as though county staff had washed their hands of him. But the previous summer, when he was dropped by England Under-19s after going wicketless in the first Test against West Indies, “was really the straw that broke the camel’s back in terms of spirit and belief”. He adds: “That absolutely destroyed me.”

Former Fulham academy footballer Max Noble has spoken out in recent weeks about his own experiences and the feeling in retrospect that he was viewed as little more than a commodity, binned without support once he was no longer deemed an asset.

“That’s just so accurate,” reflects Broadhurst, concurring with what Noble has exposed. It had a profound effect. By the time he was released by Yorkshire, Broadhurst was still only 19. Nottinghamshire signed him up off the back of a trial, but the damage was done.

“By that point, I remember going out with friends in Barnsley and I’d started getting paranoid,” he explains. “What had happened to me started to manifest itself in other parts of my life. I could feel something wasn’t right.”

He spent two years at Trent Bridge, but the yips clung to him. Such is the nature of one of elite sport’s more baffling mysteries, it is impossible to know for certain what sparked the sudden, inexplicable loss of his bowling. But given the confidence he had once possessed in his action and the time at which everything changed, he believes it was at least partially triggered by how he felt at Yorkshire. “I knew it was coming. It was down to a lot of stress,” he says.

“If I’d been at Notts all the way through my career, I’d never have got the yips. I can 100 per cent say that. From 1994 onwards for the next 10 years, I never knew if I could hit the cut strip. Not one time did I ever feel in control of my action – from my last season at Yorkshire to finishing in club cricket in 2005. Every single ball, I didn’t know whether it would go to first slip or be a good ball.”

He describes the yips as “like banging your head against a brick wall” and regrets not retiring as soon as he left Yorkshire “to save myself from all this mental grief”.

But losing the ability to bowl is a taxing, complex phenomenon. “It’s awful when something that came so easy when you were young feels like it’s taken away from you. It’s like being struck down with paralysis. It was like a bereavement, really.”

He is not the first, nor will he be the last: he reached out to former Leicestershire seamer Scott Boswell in sympathy after watching his ignominy unfold in the 2001 C&G Trophy final. The pair have since become good friends.

What kept Broadhurst going as a professional cricketer was the same drive that worsened his downfall: “I was fit and well, so I felt that I could get it back.”

But rather, what followed was far more dangerous: he found himself rushed into hospital for emergency surgery, having developed Compartment Syndrome – a condition caused by a lack of blood flow to his leg.

“I nearly lost my leg because I worked so hard in the nets to try to get it back,” he says. “The specialist did a diagnostic test and within 10 seconds the doctor told me to stop and they whisked me into the operating theatre. I’d worked myself into the ground with no oxygen getting into my leg. It was just through bowling in the nets to try to get over the yips, but I was never going to get over it. Never.”

The emotional impact was severe and wide-ranging: “When I was on trial for Notts, I played a couple of games before they signed me. I remember just hoping that they wouldn’t bowl me. I came on and there was this guy watching on the sidelines, basically shouting: ‘What have you got that guy bowling for? He has no chance.’ It was horrendous. A year previously, I’d been close to 90mph and swinging it. But with the yips, it gets to the point where you just don’t want to bowl. You’re embarrassed.”

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And so, in 1996 he was released by Nottinghamshire, who simply couldn’t wait any longer for everything to click back into gear.

A month later, Broadhurst was working in a warehouse, earning five pounds per hour. Having gone into cricket without qualifications to fall back upon, this was his new reality: tormented by the game and unable to fulfil a skillset that had come so naturally only four years earlier, he was left with nothing. There was no aftercare to speak of. Perhaps that was par for the course in a now-bygone era, but it only intensified his troubles.

“I was a professional cricketer in August and then picking up frozen chickens in a warehouse in September,” he says, looking back on that nadir. “That could really have tipped me over the edge to an even deeper spiral that I may never have got out of.”

Did those feelings extend to suicidal thoughts? “Without a doubt. From 1996 to 1999, I went through those scenarios many, many times. I lost a lot of schoolfriends – I was changing as a guy and no one could understand. I didn’t get much support from anybody, to be honest, because people didn’t really know how to deal with it back then, I suppose.

“My life was just a black hole. It’s quite tragic actually. I was talking with my son about it, and he turned around and said to me: ‘It’s a tragedy, dad, isn’t it?’ It’s not so much now because I’ve got good things in my life. But from 19 years old to 26, it was just a blur, an awful period.”

He credits his mother with his survival through that time. “My father struggled with the situation, he was heartbroken,” Broadhurst adds.

“I took it out on myself, but I never turned to drink and I never turned to drugs. I didn’t turn to anything bad, which I’m really grateful to myself for because I could easily have gone down that path.

“But I developed social phobia. I didn’t want to mix with anybody at that point. The only time I could feel comfortable was if I did go out and have a few pints. I was never the same kid again.

“I loved the game. It was never the game really that I hated, but I felt betrayed by a lot of people.”

^{As a 17-year-old in only his second first-class game, Broadhurst dismissed Sri Lanka opener Roshan Mahanama}

Several former teammates disappeared without trace and he was left to fight his battles alone. “All that left a bitter taste and it affected me greatly,” he admits. “I couldn’t work out why friendship had to rely on you being successful.

“Nobody reached out to me – they must have known I was basically going crazy. People must have known that I wasn’t the Mark that I used to be. Nobody reached out. Nothing.”

The Professional Cricketers’ Association, too, is a very different place now to what it was then. Widely – and rightly – lauded these days for their work in assisting players who have fallen on hard times, Broadhurst’s first encounter didn’t offer him the support he needed. “I remember asking for help at one point and they told me to toughen up,” he says. A second request resulted in a £500 contribution towards vocational development, with which he enrolled on a typing programme.

More recently, however, he has spoken at length to Jason Ratcliffe, who contacted him immediately in his then-guise as PCA deputy chief executive after hearing his story. “He said that even this many years down the line, if ever I needed any help, I should just ring him and they’d do anything they can to help me through any bad times.”

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In a statement, the PCA reiterated that commitment, confirming as well that they have since been in touch with him after being made aware of his story by The Cricketer: “We are saddened to hear of Mark’s experiences as a professional cricketer and we have reached out to Mark to ensure he is aware of the support that is available to him as a PCA member.

“Over the past 15 years the PCA has completely transformed the support that is available for current and past players and is a very different association to what it was in the 1990s. Members of the PCA are all aware they can reach out for support on any issue associated to their cricket career.

“We continue to offer our mental health services and provisions to all current and former players and are extremely proud of how we have developed these at the PCA and the Professional Cricketers’ Trust over the past 15 years.”

"My life was just a black hole. It's quite tragic really"

At the lowest point, Broadhurst’s dedication to league cricket only further accentuated his issues. He found it toughest when coming up against players who were once so inferior, but now could face him without bother.

“I couldn’t deal with it,” he says. “That’s why the black hole didn’t end when I left Notts – because I carried on playing.

“I was bowling at club batsmen who were getting runs off me when they would have been running to square leg previously. It was terrible.

“If I look back now, I should have stopped playing cricket in 1996. I didn’t enjoy it at all. Once I finished at Nottinghamshire, I should have found something else and got out of cricket. I wasn’t well mentally and, the more cricket I played, I just got worse and worse. It was a bad decision. But you’re in your mid-20s, so you think it’s going to come back the next day.”

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In 1999, Kent took that precise gamble somewhat out of the blue after a scout had spotted him playing league cricket for Barnsley. And like Nottinghamshire before them, head coach John Wright wondered whether he might be the man to reignite Broadhurst’s fire and drag him back from his abyss.

Only, he retired two months later, unable to carry on with his mental health as it was. A vivid image remains in his mind of his final throes in the professional game. He had been preparing to set off with his new teammates on a pre-season bonding trip to Wales when he realised that he couldn’t go on.

“That’s when the depression kicked in worse than ever,” he says. “I knew it as I boarded the bus. I basically walked off the bus and told John Wright I couldn’t do it anymore. The depression hit home and I had to go back to Barnsley for two weeks, before going back down to Kent again. I tried to get going again but the depression had just completely consumed me by then.

“That’s the day I retired. John Wright phoned my dad that day and said that whoever had contributed to this happening to his boy, it was a complete travesty. He said he’d never seen a more naturally gifted fast bowler.”

^{Broadhurst (second row, far right) during his brief spell with Kent, before his battle with mental health - brought on by the yips - caused his retirement}

Broadhurst is grateful to Kent, though; they kickstarted his recovery process, recognising the gravity of what he was going through and arranging for him to see a counsellor. In twentieth-century elite sport, those levels of empathy weren’t necessarily the norm: understanding of mental illness was far from where it is now. So much so that, for a time, he believed that what he had been through was part and parcel of the era.

“Kent were fantastic,” he stresses. “They really tried to help me. I found out later in life that I needed medication. Even with counselling, I don’t think you can get out of it when you’re that far in, so it took medication a few years later for me to start turning my life back around.”

That step came in 2001, once he felt as though he had exhausted all other options: “Nothing else was working.”

"I nearly lost my leg because I worked so hard to get my bowling back"

When he left for Canada in 2010, it was a relief and an attempt to begin afresh in a different continent, miles away from what he had come to hate. “I left to escape a lot of things,” he admits. “I wasn’t just running away from cricket, but I was running away from the devastation of my cricket career and what it had done to my general life. I just needed to see another perspective. There were a lot of things wrapped into it, but the main cause was what happened to my cricket career. I was in a pretty dark place.

“I’d gone back to league cricket again and it didn’t go too well, so I just knew that I had to get away from England basically. There were too many reminders of what had happened. There were too many reminders of everything; the demons were still there. I had to get away and become the lad that I knew I could be if I got away from England.”

Snowboarding became a new passion: the slopes in the Canadian Rockies allowed him to feel a freedom that had been missing since his teenage years. “I was probably too sensitive a soul to ever really fulfil my full potential,” he suggests. “Without leaving cricket, I may never have found my real happy place.”

Even in Calgary, he would bowl with a tennis ball in his home’s sizeable basement, wondering whether he might still have a hope of returning to county cricket. But those thoughts were never rational and were founded on a lingering sense of unfinished business.

Once they abated, Broadhurst was finally able to move on. He missed four Ashes series during his time away and took no interest in any of them. “I don’t think I thought about cricket for five of those seven years,” he estimates.

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But since the playing careers of his generation have come to an end, he has been able to let go of what might have been and allow the game back into his life. At this stage, though, that won’t extend to a return to Headingley.

“I still have dreams now that I can bowl,” he adds with a wry chuckle – he can finally take some solace from those fantasies.

Because, at the end of a brutal history, there lies a light at the end of a tunnel. Broadhurst is married – to Louise, “who accepted me for who I was” – with children and has worked in IT for two decades, now with his own company and as a consultant to clients. He still suffers with his mental health but has learnt “to live with the demons and compartmentalise the grief” attached to his cricket.

“I’m proud of myself,” he declares, which feels particularly poignant in this case. For a considerable period in his adulthood, he never felt able to believe that. But once he had come to terms with his retirement, he took out a £2,000 loan to undertake a Microsoft course and devoted himself to making something of a new chapter.

Sharing this story, he adds in a later phone call, has helped him uncover cheerier memories of the cricketer he was in those early years, hurtling in and bowling fast. What video footage he once had, however, has gone; aged 19, he taped over a VHS recording of his 15-year-old self in training at Lilleshall with a documentary about tigers. Quite simply, re-watching what was once so natural hurt too much. These days, that anecdote evokes a howling laugh and only a tinge of regret that he can’t pass it onto his son as proof of the talent he used to have.

And so, he is at peace now with a nightmare that began three decades ago as a teenager and has even thought about trying his hand at coaching, aware of the wisdom he could impart.

“I’ve started enjoying Test cricket again and I loved the World Cup in 2019,” he says. “I speak about it a lot to my friends. I’ve started watching amateur cricket again; before the pandemic, I took my sons up to the local ground.”

And while that might sound completely trivial, it represents another enormous stride in the right direction, away from a troubled past.

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