I can’t help thinking that the world would be a better place – no worse, anyway – if Jonathan Trott hadn’t agreed to be interviewed. He was, presumably, trying to clarify and draw a line under the whole episode, but the result was a muddying of the waters. Not so muddy, however, that Michael Vaughan, in his Daily Telegraph column, and others, haven’t dived in – again, without which the world be no worse.

Vaughan’s beef centred on two assumptions. Firstly, that Trott’s assertion that he suffered from “burnout” didn’t square with the ECB saying at the time that his departure was down to a “stress-related illness.” Certainly, Andy Flower’s comments that “Trotty has been suffering from a stress-related condition for quite a while” and that “he’s always managed it very successfully” seems at odds with Trott’s take on it. The second assumption made by Vaughan is that this ambiguity and apparent discrepancy in stories will mean that “players in his own dressing room and in the opposition will look at him and think at the toughest of times he did a runner.”

While it may be academic to note that Vaughan has history with Trott dating back to an incident in 2008 when the then England captain accused the South African born batsman of celebrating a South Africa victory, it is worth considering the views of someone who has been there and done it. If, as Andrew Miller wrote, Vaughan’s view is “remotely representative of an average team’s attitude to mental matters, – and England right now, to borrow Stuart Broad’s phrase, are distinctly average – “then they are among the most valuable insights we could ever hope to get from former pros.”

It is not only Vaughan’s standing in the game that prevents me, as tempted as I might be, from dismissing his argument as grossly insensitive rubbish. After all, his conclusion that Trott was “suffering for cricket reasons” is not without logic.

Batting, perhaps more than any other sporting discipline, is a mental game. The title of Martin Crowe’s timely piece on Cricinfo says as much: “To bat right, get your mind right.” As David Warner proved with his ill-judged “scared eyes” comment, it didn’t take a trained psychologist to see that Trott’s mind wasn’t right during that Brisbane Test. Perhaps Vaughan was right about Trott. Mitchell Johnson might have spooked him, maybe he had been found out. Perhaps, as Rob Steen suggested on Cricinfo, he had trouble dealing with failure. All part of the game, one might say, but equally the game is part of life – a life in which one’s mental health is more important.

This is where I take issue with Vaughan. In saying that Trott was “suffering for cricketing reasons and not mental, and there is a massive difference,” I think he is missing the point. The point is that Trott was suffering. Suffering to the point where he felt he could no longer continue. What name we give to this suffering, and the reasons given for it, seem to me to be immaterial.

“I think every sports person’s been there and when that builds up to a certain point, you’re like ‘I’ve got to get out of here.'”

That quote, you may be surprised to learn, comes from a certain SR Waugh. In an interview yesterday in which he expressed sympathy with Trott, he went on: “You’re feeling really homesick and things aren’t going well – but it really wasn’t the way 20 years ago [to say anything or leave]. You just gutsed it out and that was all part of being a professional cricketer.”

Perhaps Vaughan is continuing the tradition of former players claiming that the game has gone soft. Bats are expanding as boundaries are shrinking. Outfields are quicker; the bowling slower. Pitches, as Geoffrey Boycott often reminds us, are no longer uncovered. Likewise batsmen’s heads. That is all undeniably true, but to suggest, as Vaughan does, that “there is a danger we are starting to use stress-related illness and depression too quickly as tags for players under pressure” seems incredibly harsh to me. The counter-argument is that we have progressed to a point where players like Trott no longer have to suffer in silence.

Leaving the tour would not have been a decision that Trott made lightly or suddenly. My first thought on hearing the news, after sympathy, was to think back to Trent Bridge and the first day of the home Ashes series. Trott top scored with 48 but I remember thinking at the time that it was a most un-Trott like innings. With hindsight it is easy to think that we were witnessing (before Mitchell Johnson had entered the equation, don’t forget) the first flames of the fire that was to lead to his burnout.

That he was allowed to burnout – as were the England team in general – is the most pressing issue. Maybe Trott – clearly an intense cricketer – should shoulder some of the blame. Perhaps he wasn’t managed particularly well. Less open to question is the idea that too much is asked of international cricketers. Admittedly, the back-to-back Ashes was an extreme case, but it doesn’t disguise the perception that the welfare of the players is forgotten in the scramble to satisfy the game’s administrators, television companies and advertising executives.

Something strange happened last Thursday. I found myself desperately willing Jade Dernbach to bowl England to victory. Not that strange, you might think, for an English cricket fan to want the England cricket team to win, but let me explain.

The clue is in the wording: “an English cricket fan.” Different to being an England fan. It’s not that I don’t want England to win, but I’m a bigger fan of cricket than I am of the England cricket team. It’s the same with football, which gives the best example of my admittedly slightly perverse attitude. Remember Euro 2000, when England beat Germany? Vaguely, probably, because it was such a dire game, overshadowed by shameless hooliganism, and as such not as memorable as the glorious failures of Italia 90 and Euro 96. Nor was it satisfyingly redemptive, in the way that the 2005 Ashes was.

Let’s face it, England fans – even English cricket fans – would have taken any win over Australia after years of humiliation, but the quality and drama of 2005 made England’s victory all the sweeter. As did the quality of the opposition, which was curiously lacking in the case of Germany in Euro 2000.

Anyway, back to last Thursday and a dead rubber in an inconsequential series of a format I have little time for. So much so that I had forgotten that the match was even being played, only tuning into TMS with four overs to go. So how did I find myself on the edge of my seat, desperate for Dernbach – a player I have little time for – to prevent West Indies scoring the seventeen runs required from the final over?

Maybe it is just another example of the power of cricket to engineer dramatic finishes, and my susceptibility to be absorbed by them, but I think it is more than that. It is still too early to say how England will rebuild from the wreckage of the recent Ashes, but for now it is a return to the England of my youth, Atherton’s England, and the reduction of hopes and expectations is strangely reassuring. Defeat is less hard to swallow; victory all the more treasured.

The following day, news broke that I wasn’t the only one to care disproportionately about the match. Ben Stokes managed to break his wrist, punching a locker after being dismissed first ball, and will now miss the T20 World Cup.

This weekend will see the conclusion of the Six Nations. I’m reliably informed that England have an outside chance of winning. I can reliably inform you that I really don’t care. I don’t mean that I don’t care if England win or not – although I don’t – I mean that I don’t care about rugby.

I must admit that much of my antipathy towards rugby union, as with golf, is class based. And yet I love cricket, a sport as elitist and exclusive as they come. Just take a trip to Lord’s. My friend Jim jokes that I have a “blind spot.” Perhaps he’s right, but I like to think I love cricket despite the fact that it is often played and watched and governed by the over-privileged. Likewise, my dislike of rugby goes deeper than inverse snobbery.

It’s the same when footballers are compared to rugby players. Yes, rugby players show a greater respect for the referee, and they don’t dive, but the quality of a sport isn’t determined by the character and behaviour of those playing it. Sure, it would be nice if footballers didn’t try to con the ref – just as it would be nice if batsmen walked – but, essentially, football remains a better game than rugby regardless of who plays. Indeed, much of my loathing of rugby stems from the fact that it is not football.

Maybe I’m just bitter at having been made to play rugby at school during what I had always known as the football season, just as I resented having to do athletics during the cricket season. I’ve written before that I find it hard to like things I’m no good at, and there is an element of that in my dislike of rugby. I’d like to think, however, that there’s more to it than that.

So, what is it about rugby that I find so dull, so incomprehensible – so unlike football? I think it boils down to a lack of flow. Even in a dull game of football the ball is always moving. A tackle doesn’t stop the game unless it is a foul. A fussy ref or a dirty team are said to spoil the game. By that logic, rugby is spoilt.

Consider, also, the differing attitudes to putting the ball out of play. In football, it might be an error or a last-ditch clearance. In rugby, it is an attacking ploy. How can deliberately stopping the game make for exciting viewing? And it’s not as if the restarts are particularly satisfactory. Scrums and lineouts are forever being retaken, and to me seem like an excuse to get half the players out of the way. Maybe they should just have fewer players. And a round ball. And stop hand-balling it.

What I find most irritating about watching rugby, however, is the sense that it could be so much better. When it is good it is very good. Think of that try by the British Lions back in the day. But those moments of skill and excitement are so rare. Most of the time the ball is lost under a pile of gym-freaks or being punted aimlessly back and forth or out of play.

It’s just not football.

Thanks to the wonders of (and, perhaps more wondrous yet, my adoption of) modern technology, I am currently listening to ABC Grandstand as South Africa, somewhat fittingly, battle to save the game and the series on what is their captain Graeme Smith’s last day of international cricket.

It is a truism that a cricket team plays in the mould of its captain, and this has been especially true of South Africa under Smith. They may not have won a global tournament, but the “chokers” tag no longer applies to a team that holds the ICC Test Championship Mace and has made a habit of winning and saving Test matches.

Another truism is that much is revealed in the fourth innings of a Test. Obviously the outcome of the match, but also the character of individuals and teams, and this is where Smith and his side are held up in a blindingly good light. Smith’s fourth innings stats are incredible: 1611 runs at 51.96 with four centuries – each scored in a winning cause. Indeed, his stats in fourth innings wins are peerless: 1141 runs at 87.76. I will always remember Smith for his match-winning 154 not out at Edgbaston in 2008.

It takes a singular character to play a significant knock in the last innings of a Test match, especially when trying to save a game. One who can either bat with no heed to the context of the game, in the bubble, or who can find motivation by turning not losing into the new winning. For the former, think Alastair Cook and Jonathan Trott at Brisbane in 2010 – a last innings to all intents and purposes when it began, even if it didn’t turn out that way. For the latter, think Michael Atherton at The Wanderers in 1995. Whether in winning or saving a match, the fourth innings can be defined, bloody-mindedly, by one man. Think Graeme Smith.

They can also be team efforts, though. Think Graeme Smith’s South Africa. And, to be fair, England under Andy Flower, who made a habit of snatching draws from the jaws of defeat, starting at Cardiff in 2009..

Jimmy Anderson and Monty Panesar somehow surviving is a cricketing JFK moment, and  I can remember exactly where I was. I was on a train. On my way back from Cardiff.

Of course a part of me had doubted the wisdom of leaving an Ashes Test early, but at the time it had seemed like the right thing to do. My mate James had checked the trains, and it was either leave at tea and get home at a reasonable hour, or … Or what? The final over before tea had sealed the deal, Peter Siddle peppering Graeme Swann. England didn’t stand a chance. Why stay and watch the humiliation of an innings defeat? We all know how it panned out, and my I Was There story is told with emphasis on the Was.

Following on from Cardiff, there were the two efforts on the 2009/10 tour to South Africa, Brisbane 2010, and Auckland last year. While each of these great escapes had their bloody-minded heroes (usually Paul Collingwood), they were, above all, team efforts. They had to be, 9 wickets down, and they bear testimony to the team spirit fostered by Flower, the seeds sown by Nasser Hussain, Duncan Fletcher, and the advent of central contracts.

These draws fly in the face of history and logic, however. Much more likely are capitulations like that seen in the first Test of the recent Ashes series, and, when the psychology of the last innings is considered, it is not hard to see why. Imagine how easy it was to be Michael Clarke, having just spanked a hundred and holding all the cards: new ball, fresh and confident bowlers, and the ace that was Mitchell Johnson. Time and runs were pretty much out of the equation. It was all about those ten England wickets. He could be as funky and attacking as he liked. Eleven against two, out in the middle. The home crowd roaring them on.

Now imagine being an England batsman. You’re knackered for a start, from chasing leather in the hot sun. You might have failed in the first innings, falling to a carefully laid plan. A glance at the scoreboard wouldn’t help. I’m a competitive soul, but in that situation I am sure I would think, however subconsciously, what is the point? Yes, there is pride and competitive spirit, but does that defeatist thought permeate through a dressing room? Attitudes are contagious, it wouldn’t take much – a couple of early wickets, say.

Add in the habit of losing the first Test of an overseas tour, and England’s second innings should have come as no surprise. For all that the Brisbane defeat was a regression to the dark days of the 1990s, there were still plenty of straws to clutch. Brisbane, like so many first Tests of overseas tours, wasn’t a true reflection of this England team, was it? For all that the 3-0 scoreline in the summer was not a true reflection of the merits of the two sides, Australia hadn’t suddenly become world beaters – just as England hadn’t suddenly become whipping boys. Adelaide would be different, we thought.

Only it wasn’t. Almost a carbon copy, in fact. The toss didn’t help, but a thrashing at Adelaide – flat, bat-friendly Adelaide, where South Africa had batted forever to save a Test in 2012 – was a clear indication that Flower’s England were not the side they once were.

As I write, the same cannot be said of Graeme Smith’s South Africa. Despite another Smith – Steve – just getting Faf du Plessis LBW, South Africa still have an outside chance of pulling off one last unlikely draw. They have one more session and three more wickets to give Smith a fitting send off.