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.