In his recent book, Fierce Focus, Greg Chappell a former captain of Australia and a former coach of India expressed his surprise at what he described as the mental fragility of Sachin Tendulkar in 2006 when he was having a lean time with the physical and mental aspects of his game.

Brian Lara had similar problems on more than one occasion during his illustrious career and Tiger Woods the great golfer has recently been struggling with the same difficulty.

The enormous demands and the high expectations of millions of people around the world create pressures on superstars like Lara, Tendulkar and Woods that sometimes got the better of them and produced symptoms of mental fatigue or fragility.

Jonathan Trott