Those are the students.

Those are the stirring sounds of the last post, immaculately played by the Barmy Army trumpeter Simon Finch,

as we collectively mourned the tragic passing of Graham Thorpe at a ground where he would often have played, Teddington Cricket Club in Bushy Park.

We were gathered for a fundraising day with the professional cricketers trust,

the charitable arm of the PCA,

which supports current and past cricketers who are finding life tough to deal with in one way or another

and seek professional help.

The plight of Thorpe, who an inquest has now revealed, walked in front of a train last Sunday,

is a further harrowing example of the traumas, cricketers in particular, seem to suffer.

There is even a book on this rather macabre topic, Silence of the Heart,

by the venerable cricket journalist David Frith,

which details accounts of over 100 cricketers who've taken their own lives in the past

century or so, a rate far, far higher than the national average for any other sport in any other

country. So in this podcast we're going to hear from some other former cricketers, for instance

Paul Nixon and Monty Panasar to explore why cricket does seem to push so many players to

the brink and how to try and conquer your inner demons. And we also discover how the professional

cricketers trust are trying to help and hear from one former player whose life

was a low ebb with a seriously debilitating medical condition until the trust helped him turn it

around. But first, some context. Knowing the stresses and strains that cricketers regularly experience,

a host of former players, the likes of Alex Tudor, Darren Stevens, Stuart Mika and Nyan

Doshi, as well as Nixon and Panasar, and Surrey Women's Captain Amy Gordon, gave up their

time yesterday at Teddington to coach youngsters and perform master classes and exhibit a little

...