The former England batsman opens up about the mental health issues that caused him to unravel during the back-to-back Ashes series of 2013

Three years ago, in August 2013, Jonathan Trott felt so tormented by cricket that, as a way of avoiding another day of a Test against Australia at The Oval, he thought of some distressing ways to escape. “Just briefly,” he explains, “I considered driving my car into the Thames or into a tree. That way I could get out of the ordeal.”

This was a Test in which Trott scored 99 runs – 40 in the first innings and 59 in the second. The game was drawn and England sealed a 3-0 series win to retain the Ashes. It should have been another high point in Trott’s impressive career and yet, as his new book reveals, that game was a dark marker in his unravelling.

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“You want to find a way to avoid going to the ground,” Trott says. “You hope the covers have leaked overnight – or you hope for rain. But it got bad and, as soon as I put my tracksuit on, it was like a trigger. I was going back into that arena, that pressure cooker, that place of judgment.”

Trott is contained and controlled – but his book, Unguarded, is raw and revelatory. It might not quite match Andre Agassi’s Open but, in documenting how the brutal grind of professional sport can unsettle its best performers, Trott’s autobiography warrants comparison with that riveting book.

Two months after his near-collapse at The Oval, Trott and England faced another battle for the Ashes in Australia. Trott, feeling broken, left the tour after just one Test. His captain, Alastair Cook, had seen tears in Trott’s eyes when he walked out to join him in the middle in Brisbane. A more haunting image of turmoil had already been witnessed. Practising in the nets, Trott had set the bowling machine to its fastest speed.

“He must have been hit hard 20 times,” Cook recalls in the book. “Again and again, he took terrible blows. It was horrible to watch … to my lasting regret, I didn’t do anything.”

Trott grimaces amid a graphic memory. “Cookie was in the net next to me. The machine was set to any length at high speed. Instead of what I normally do in practice I was looking for a quick fix. I was trying to justify things and prove to the coaches how hard I was working.”

Australia’s fast bowlers, led by a menacing Mitchell Johnson, were devastating. “They circled like hyenas round a dying zebra,” Trott suggests. Yet he was not worried about being hurt. His fear was of failure and being exposed. “I’ve faced really quick attacks. My highest ODI score was 137 [in Sydney in 2011] against Johnson, Lee, and Tait. But in 2013 I couldn’t respond. I felt in slow motion. I felt really bad in the Ashes over here, even before Johnson turned up. So it was not just him. It was my technique. When your head is moving you can’t pick up the ball as quickly. You can’t judge the length. I was a sitting duck. But I’ve never been scared of quick bowling. Never. It’s more that the opposition use it as a sign of weakness and the waters become muddied.”

I interviewed Trott six months before that breakdown in Brisbane. On the eve of those back-to-back Ashes, he told me that, having an imposing average of 86.42 against Australia up to that point, the key was to approach each Test as if it was just “a club game”. I suggested then that Trott had a “dry sense of humour” – with both of us unaware he was lurching towards crisis.

England had just lost the final of the Champions Trophy against India and, in our 2013 interview, Trott said: “I still feel upset.” He now pinpoints that defeat as the start of his descent into darkness. “I was very upset about it – same as Ashley Giles [then England’s limited‑overs coach]. It would have changed his coaching career if we’d won. The more I look back the more I regret it. I was with Ashley yesterday and we spoke about it – without really talking because we still feel hurt.”

Surely Trott would have endured similar trauma even if England had won their first major one-day tournament on home soil? “Maybe not. I was so disappointed with the way I got out [as England fell five runs short]. Losing a final at Edgbaston, my home ground, made me doubly determined to do well in the Ashes. You become your own worst enemy. Before then I was focused on the process – scraping my mark in the ground, getting ready for the next ball. But I’d look at the scoreboard and think: ‘Jesus, I’m on 0. I need 80 to keep standing still.’”

His paranoia was intensified by England’s demands – made worse by the England and Wales Cricket Board’s agreement to stage two Ashes series in the same year. Was this relentless schedule the main cause of his disintegration? “I’d say 50-50. After that Oval Test I got offered the opportunity not to play ODIs against Australia before we went back over there. Andy Flower [then England’s head coach] asked me what I thought but it felt like a test. He said: ‘You missed the one-day series in India in January but this is now.’ I said: ‘OK, I’ll play.’ I didn’t want to argue with him.”

Two months later Trott fell apart in Brisbane – also the scene of one of his great Test innings. In November 2010, against an attack including Johnson, Trott hit 135 as he and Cook shared an unbroken stand of 329.

In writing so candidly about his subsequent implosion does Trott hope the ECB might reconsider England’s workload? “Perhaps people will get more insight into it – but my intention was not to try and force any change.”

Surely change is needed? “Yeah, but some guys have coped OK. Could there be less international cricket? Yes. Most people would say so. But we’re the only country that plays from April to September so only England can go to eight other places in the winter.”

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His caution is plain in avoiding further controversy after Michael Vaughan instructed his lawyers in the wake of the Times running an extract from Trott’s book. Trott stresses the contrast between him and Vaughan: “I have a bald head and chipped teeth; he has new hair and suddenly brilliant white teeth.” But will their dispute end soon? “Um … these points have been made in the book and I’m pretty happy with the way it’s been said. I think the book’s well written and I get my point across. There are plenty of people I’ve disagreed with but I’ve written nicely about them.”

In March 2014 he had been disappointed with Vaughan’s reaction to a television interview in which Trott addressed the reasons for his departure from Australia. Trott attempted to explain his problems – which the sports psychiatrist Steve Peters diagnosed as “situation-based anxiety” rather than depression – and Vaughan complained that he felt “conned … we were allowed to believe [Trott] was struggling with a serious mental health issue … but he was struggling for cricketing reasons”.

His wife, Abi, explains that, after reading his newspaper column, she wrote an unsent letter to Vaughan. “It’s not horrid or abusive. It just makes it plain how much damage he caused.” Will Abi eventually send her letter to Vaughan? “It’s up to her really.”

Before he was burnt-out and scarred by the intensity of international cricket, Trott approached his Test debut with thrilling certainty. Remembering his mood before a very different Oval Test in 2009, when he hit a century in an Ashes decider, Trott says: “I opened my hotel door and my mum, dad, uncle and grandad were frozen against the wall. They were apprehensive and nervous. I said: ‘C’mon, it’ll be all right!’ I felt prepared and really confident. I was very excited. At the end of day three, one of my best days ever, I got a hundred and I wanted to go back to the changing rooms and sit with my team-mates. I’d had the best fun ever. But I got whisked away for a Sky interview and I thought: ‘OK, that’s done.’ They said: ‘No, you’ve got another interview.’

“I think this gives you the scarring and apprehension about playing sport. It’s not the actual game. It’s more the consequences and knowing what those guys are punching into their laptops or what people are saying about you. You are judged and if you’re not in the right frame of mind it brings you down – which happened to me.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trott guided Warwickshire to victory in the final of this year’s Royal London One Day Cup. Photograph: Sarah Ansell/Getty Images

Trott’s problems emerged far earlier. He describes his sports-crazed childhood in South Africa and his unsettling perception that the mood at home was dictated by whether or not he was scoring lots of runs in schoolboy cricket. He almost felt he would no longer be loved if he was not a prodigious run-machine. Trott stresses how much his parents helped him but, also, “between us, we created something of a monster”.

Has he told them how he felt? “A couple of times. But you don’t often get a kid aged three who knows what he wants to do. You have this drive and sometimes it’s uncontrollable. You feel the pressure. When I was eight I felt like a guy starting his professional career. Going home you step back into the environment where if you’d scored 25 your normal mum would say: ‘That’s great.’ My mother would be like: ‘OK – get a 50 next time.’”

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Trott also wrote his book in an effort to explain to his half-brother, the former cricketer Kenny Jackson, what happened to him – for Jackson had not been sympathetic to Trott’s plight in Australia. “He’s very much from my mum’s school. When I told him about leaving the tour he said: ‘Get back out there. You’re not doing anything sitting at home.’

“It’s right in a way and similar to what Steve Peters said: ‘You’ve got to deal with getting out and failing.’ But without a plan it’s hopeless. Kenny wasn’t as naturally gifted as me but he was from the Andy Flower school. Very tough and never take the easy road. But sometimes you have to take the road to wellness.”

Trott left Australia having played 49 Tests. He believes that winning his 50th cap, 18 months later in the Caribbean, was his greatest achievement. Those three Tests against the West Indies last year were a sporting failure – but he had picked himself up and tried again. Trott hit one 50 and he knew his international career was finished. He ended up staring into a toilet mirror in Bridgetown, seeing “the toll cricket had taken on me”, relieved it was all over.

He has just completed the domestic season with Warwickshire on a high. Trott, batting with serene composure, hit a match-winning unbeaten 82 in the Royal London Cup final at Lord’s last month. Relishing his freedom from the conveyor belt of international cricket, the 35-year-old is looking forward to some media work and watching Tottenham this winter. But is he intent on still playing cricket – for the love of a game which once tortured him?

“Definitely,” Trott says. “It’s fantastic. I am very proud of my England career but I now have that drive to help younger players at Warwickshire. I like that responsibility of being a senior player with the challenge of setting the bar high. I still get that buzz from excelling.”

• Jonathan Trott’s Unguarded is available at Guardian Bookshop • In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. Hotlines in other countries can be found here.