The long road back for Aaron Beard

Aaron Beard is honest enough to admit that the thought crossed his mind last summer to pack it in.

"I couldn't have done another year like that because it wasn't what I wanted to be doing," he says. "I could imagine that other things would have made me happier."

Before making his comeback against Middlesex in the T20 Blast two months ago, it had been in September 2020 when he last represented Essex's first team – a hiatus of 634 days spent working and wondering. A hamstring injury three sleeps from the start of the 2021 season spawned a physical and mental battle for confidence that has taken time to overcome, and a trusted group of friends to help him through.

Fuelled by his own enthusiasm, he rushed back too soon, trained when he ought to have rested, overbowled himself and ended up spending the season in the second string, searching and striving for rhythm that wasn't forthcoming. "It was tricky because I knew where I wanted to be playing," he says, attempting to explain how the missing synergy between mind and body manifested itself.

He settles for this: "I just couldn't make it happen. It never really got back to where I should have been. Last year felt like it was two years, not just six months. This year has been a bit of a relief."

Beard has been around the traps at Chelmsford for almost a decade but is still only 24 – and he could pass for younger. It feels almost unfathomable that a local lad so highly regarded featured in none of the 37 matches played by Essex in 2021.

His first professional wickets came in surprising the Sri Lankan tourists with his pace as an 18-year-old six years ago, by which time he had already sub-fielded for England in an Ashes warmup. Life came at him fast, the upshot of which was the external misperception of an experienced pro, when in reality Beard maintains that he is still learning his trade.

"The thing that grates on me is that people don't think I'm young anymore," he says. "In any other form of work, I'd be the youngster. But because I've been around for 10 years playing first-team cricket or at least around the first team, they think I'm not young."

^{Aaron Beard went almost two years without an appearance for Essex's first team (Jacques Feeney/Getty Images)}

At the moment, he is happy to be classed as a senior player in a youthful Royal London Cup side, a competition whose benefits he can see in the performances of his county's next generation, where Jamal Richards, Robin Das, Luc Benkenstein and Josh Rymell are all being blooded. In hindsight, there is also a sense that its quirks would have been good for his own development as a teenager.

"You're not really thrown in the deep end as such because you're missing out on a lot of first-team players," he says. "But you're still playing against serious county cricketers, so it's only going to improve them – slowly integrating them into first-team cricket is exactly how I think it works."

Ultimately, he hopes that the tournament drives them to want to represent Essex more frequently: "I hope to show them that how I train and how I go about my work is because I want to play every single game for Essex's first team."

It's clear that Beard loves his county: he sets out being capped as "the dream", stemming from watching those presentations from the stands as a child, and there is a real sense of gratitude towards his teammates for how they guided him through his troubles. "It's just an honour to play for Essex," he insists.

A lot of hard work went into making sure that could happen again, including a week that he took off completely in the middle of last season just to escape and recharge his batteries. The major lesson from a year he considers his most valuable as an athlete – "without even playing games" – is that going wrong is fine. He isn't the first – even in his own dressing room – to have lost his way: "Some of the biggest players in the world will have gone through something similar, but you just won't have heard about it."

He adds: "After speaking to people, I realised that it's just normal to go through things that don't quite go your way. Not every month, not every year is going to be your year or your month or your day or your hour. It's absolutely fine because we're all human, we're allowed to not be at the top of our game every single minute we play."

That message has struck a particular chord with Beard, whose entire adult life – and most of his childhood – has been spent as a cricketer. His main shift since, though, has been to remind himself of why he first came to love the game. "I didn't start off playing cricket as a career or as a job," he says.

"I started because it was something I enjoyed. So, I've gone back to that mindset of – when times do get tough – making sure that I remember that this was my dream. You have to go back to the enjoyment factor in life: there are many people who would love to be professional cricketers playing for Essex. I'm very lucky to have that opportunity.

^{Beard took two wickets against Middlesex in his first game back (Harry Trump/Getty Images)}

"I've learnt a lot about myself: the way I train, the way I should train, the way I should play, the attitude that I should go into a game with. I learnt how other people can help you: the biggest thing I learnt was that there's a lot more to life than cricket. It's very frustrating: you'd go away from cricket, but you don't really because you're still thinking about it. It's your livelihood at the end of the day.

"Cricket is your life and your job, and I love it. But you can't just do cricket. You have to have something to fall away to. It's such an intense game: all day, every day, for four days. The schedule is hectic. When people tell you to 'just relax', it's probably the most overused wasted saying you can ever say. It's so much harder than that – by telling someone to relax, they won't relax. That's why I try to find ways of getting away and relaxing: to find something to get away from it is such a weight off your shoulders."

For that, he has found solace in fishing, a passion that goes back through generations of his family, and – over a lengthy conversation – is where he finds himself at his most comfortable.

"I go down the lake, I take a little barbecue with me, take some music, take the odd beer, sit in the sun with the rods out," he says, describing the idyllic scene that has become his getaway. "I like to go for 48 hours and sleep under the stars. It's relaxing. It definitely changes my mood. I camp out and everything. I love it."

Beard is gradually convincing his colleagues to join him, but for the moment he catches carp with a schoolfriend on the lakes around Witham, Malden and Chelmsford. With Mark Pettini, the former Essex captain, he explores the rivers for pike, sole and perch.

The roots of this obsession – his garage has become a storage space for his equipment – are with his maternal grandad, though his father's uncle has lately become another companion.

"My mum's dad was a huge fisherman," he says. "When he retired, he went every single day that he could. Every chance. My nan would make him a packed lunch, a flask and a coffee, and he'd be out the door – dawn to dusk. Whenever I used to go and see them, my nan used to wave through the window by the door, but I was straight in my grandad's car to go fishing. I'd hardly see my nan because I'd spend the whole day with grandad!"

^{Beard spent time on loan at Sussex earlier this summer (Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)}

There's a wider point to this refreshing tangent, though. "Anything that gets away from talking about cricket," laughs Beard, who lists food markets and golf among his other pastimes. For a character who has realised the importance of uncluttering from the grind, fishing feels a perfect antidote: total, blissful relaxation with enough focus required to keep the mind engaged.

"We go whenever we can, when my uncle isn't working – he's a very good fisherman. It's nice to go away with a family member as well to spend time with them. They can understand what's going on with that time off – they're obviously stressed with work as well. My uncle works really hard with his building stuff."

Talk briefly swings back to his comeback appearance: a win at Lord's, where Beard looked anything but a returner suffocated by the pressure of playing his first game for Essex since the Bob Willis Trophy final on the same ground in the Covid summer, only with a brief loan spell at Sussex in between. He considered it a new lease of life with "a licence to let loose" at the ideal ground to begin an internal reset.

He took two wickets in an excellent win; the next day, he returned career-best figures in a victory over Surrey. A fortnight later, he signed a two-year contract extension, met by plentiful public goodwill, and all was well with the world once more. The same people who'd kept him going through 2021 flooded his phone with messages, reminding him of the happy ending they'd promised.

"It wound me up but, I knew that they were right," he reflects. "At the time, you just don't believe that what they're saying is going to be true, but they told me not to waste the opportunity that I've got, with the talent that I have and how much I love it when I'm doing well and am in the team, not overthinking it.

"People just said: 'If you gave this up, you'd be making a big, big mistake.' It's definitely been hard work, but it's been worth it.

"You cherish the good moments so much. It was my dream when I was a youngster and is still my dream now."