The Edge

In case you didn’t know, we’re halfway through what is shap­ing up to be a his­toric sum­mer for Eng­lish crick­et, with the men’s One Day Inter­na­tion­al team hav­ing won the Crick­et World Cup for the first time last week and the Test side gear­ing up to face old foes Aus­tralia in the Ash­es next month. What bet­ter time, then, to reflect on the tri­umphs and tragedies of the nation’s last tru­ly great group of red ball cricketers?

Bar­ney Dou­glas’ doc­u­men­tary The Edge charts the rise of the Eng­land Test team from the pits of the world rank­ings to the top of the pile between 2009 and 2013. The film pitch­es the squad as a plucky band of broth­ers, with Andrew Strauss, Alas­tair Cook, Graeme Swann, James Ander­son, Stu­art Broad and oth­er past and cur­rent mem­bers of the team reflect­ing on how they strug­gled to find form and a sense of col­lec­tive iden­ti­ty fol­low­ing a sec­ond suc­ces­sive Ash­es series vic­to­ry on home soil in 2009 – only to remould them­selves into a ruth­less win­ning machine.

It’s a nice nar­ra­tive, though in truth these play­ers were nei­ther peren­ni­al chok­ers to begin with nor ulti­mate­ly a once-in-a-gen­er­a­tion won­der side. To cast them as such feels a tad disin­gen­u­ous. Real­ly, they were a good side who under­per­formed too fre­quent­ly, who became a very good side that found a degree of con­sis­ten­cy. This is the way it gen­er­al­ly goes in pro­fes­sion­al sport. You win some, you lose some; you get knocked down then pick your­selves up and go again. The con­tin­u­al, gran­u­lar evo­lu­tion of a team doesn’t always lend itself to being neat­ly dis­tilled into 90 min­utes of pulse-quick­en­ing drama.

But this film is attempt­ing to do more than that. At its heart this is a sto­ry of sac­ri­fice, focus­ing on how elite ath­letes han­dle the pres­sure that comes with com­pet­ing at the high­est lev­el, where the mar­gins for error are often ago­nis­ing­ly slim. The film’s title car­ries numer­ous con­no­ta­tions. In crick­et, an ​‘edge’ refers to the action of the ball clip­ping the bat on its way through to the wick­et keep­er or stumps, typ­i­cal­ly result­ing in the batsman’s dis­missal. It also brings to mind the dic­tum that sport boils down to hav­ing the edge over the oppo­si­tion. Which in turn can lead to a per­son being dri­ven over the edge.

There is a psy­chol­o­gy to this, of course. You can be fit­ter, stronger, more skilled, but win­ning – and win­ning often – requires com­po­sure and men­tal tough­ness in the bristling heat of bat­tle. In this sense, Dou­glas deserves cred­it for choos­ing to fore­ground Jonathan Trott, a supreme­ly tal­ent­ed top-order bats­man who for sev­er­al years embod­ied the grit and swag­ger that under­pinned Eng­lish Test cricket’s brief peri­od of dom­i­nance, but who has since come to epit­o­mise an ugli­er, large­ly unspo­ken aspect of the game.

While Trott was a reli­able, cool-head­ed pres­ence in the side that reached the num­ber one spot in the ICC rank­ings in 2011, he will also be remem­bered for with­draw­ing from the ²⁰¹³⁄₁₄ Ash­es series in Aus­tralia dur­ing the first Test due to stress-relat­ed ill­ness. He speaks can­did­ly about that painful expe­ri­ence here, rais­ing impor­tant ques­tions about the nature of sport by reveal­ing the emo­tion­al strain he was under while rep­re­sent­ing his coun­try on the biggest stage.

Some of Dou­glas’ artis­tic choic­es are a lit­tle dubi­ous – at one point a ful­ly padded-up Trott is filmed waft­ing his bat through an emp­ty field of wheat as the sky above him dark­ens, which is a fair­ly trite visu­al metaphor. For the most part, how­ev­er, the direc­tor sim­ply lets the play­ers do the talk­ing. There are plen­ty of juicy tid­bits from the likes of Kevin Pietersen, the team’s box office mav­er­ick, whose Test career end­ed in con­tro­ver­sial cir­cum­stances, and head coach Andy Flower, renowned for his steely deter­mi­na­tion and no-non­sense meth­ods. But it’s Trott who makes the most telling contribution.

We ask a lot of pro­fes­sion­al sports­peo­ple; it’s impor­tant to be remind­ed of the fact that even though they are capa­ble of doing things the rest of us can only dream of, it doesn’t make them any less fal­li­ble or frag­ile. And that in itself doesn’t make them weak or change who they are on or off the field.