English cricket: the psychoanalyst's version

The patient, English Cricket, at first did not give much away. In his lexicon - an obvious defence mechanism - he called this "offering no loose shots".

I soon discovered a method to open him up: beer and Twitter. With this combination, he soon reclined on my sofa and began free-associating. Mein Gott, did he say some fascinating, revealing things. Not since Herschelle Gibbs' autobiography has the cricketing id been unleashed with such untrammelled force.

English first cursed the gods regarding some "illegality". Foaming at the mouth in fury, he said over and over that it was unfair, everything was so unfair, but that he would learn to conquer and master the doosra as he had done with reverse swing.

I had encountered such a case before and suggested the remedy of a strict physio routine of regular foot movement, supplemented with a DVD box set of the series in which Zaheer Abbas put the Indian spin quartet to the sword. As I discussed in my book, WG Grace and Mohammad Yousuf: the Eternal Beard, we must look to the past, to our primal beginnings, to understand and master the present.

What worried me more was English's obsessive desire for world domination. Thus I put it to him that he perhaps had a Napoleon complex. He said no, it was a Steve Waugh complex.

According to English, a demon kept getting in the way of his plans to dominate the rankings. His mind was full of rich imagery. At one stage he spoke of the world's fastest bowler hurling down slower balls in a dusty city of saints called Multan. On another occasion, the ball would defy physics and "go with the arm". Such paradoxes, as I theorised in an earlier work entitled Geoffrey Boycott's Grandmother Has Never Actually Played Cricket, are often present in a mind paralysed by incomprehension. Poor mensch.

English said that he had recently come close to undisputed global supremacy, only to die in a desert sandstorm, whirled and twirled and hung out to dry at the hands of dark men with crazy eyes.

Evidently my distressed patient had by now become delirious. He spoke of these mythical men as being the keepers to the gates of hell, which in his imagination was made up of the sun-baked pitches of Asia, where balls can lie innocent for days only to suddenly, lethally spit up like an army of cobras.

English would say that if he could only get past these devilish gatekeepers, he would be No. 1 for ever and ever. I prescribed him a strong dose of ESPNcricinfo's Statsguru in tandem with Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and told him to get real.

Feeling I was now speaking with the dull simplicity of a boarding school second XI coach, rather than the erudition of a world-renowned psychoanalyst, I asked English about his libido. I suppose it was only a matter of time.

Assessing his continual insistence on holding a straight bat, I told him it was a defensive compensation for impotency against spinning balls. He told me I was a dirty old Austrian and never saw me again.

From initial observations I made this chilling diagnosis: English had fallen under the spell of his Jungian shadow. His repressions, sublimations and terrors were all directed towards a recurrent demon figure: Pakistan.

Yet having worked so hard to rehabilitate this evil beast - even English's legal guardian, a certain Mr Giles Clarke, has served on a committee to improve the condition of Pakistan - I could make but one conclusion: the baffled, saddened, maddened English Cricket secretly - unknown even to himself - solicits such humiliations. Whether it is a Kevin Pietersen front-foot pad, an Ian Bell back-foot prod, or an Andrew Strauss caught-at-the-crease flick, English's affliction was the manifestation of a deep psychological urge we all have, though it is expressed in differing ways: the death wish.

And so, then, to the third - and final - Test.