MARCUS TRESCOTHICK'S ghosted autobiography, Coming Back to Me, belongs to an increasingly popular genre, one that admits to the notion that cricket and the cricketers themselves are not inherently interesting enough to sell. To invest the pages with more bite and, no doubt, more marketability, the player admits to some previously unrevealed trauma, or, in Trescothick's case, a trauma that had been only half-revealed.

Trescothick suffers from depression. To be more accurate, his counsellor describes him as suffering, towards the end of his England career, from “a depressive illness of mild to moderate severity with marked anxiety features”. The link between the two - playing for England with everything it entails and the depression - is so clear and obvious to Trescothick that he refuses to renounce his international retirement. He remains in the cricketing wilderness, honing his craft in the backwaters of county cricket, when, on talent alone, he could still be playing for England.

Trescothick has alluded to his illness in the past, but here we get the demons in all their black-winged fury. Indeed, the entire book feels like a journey towards the final breakdown that forced Trescothick to retire from international cricket while still in his physical prime; a journey towards the beginning of the end in Baroda, India, where Trescothick realised for the first time the severity of his illness.

He recalls his four-star imprisonment in a hotel where images kept flashing through his brain: “What was happening at home? Was Hayley [his wife] OK? Was Ellie [his daughter] all right? Oh God, what if something happened to Ellie and she needed my help and I wasn't there ... Oh God, I should be there. What the hell am I doing here? What the hell is happening? When will it stop? Will it stop at all? Am I actually, here and now, in this room, going mad?”

There is lots of this; enough to bring on depression in itself, especially if The Smiths are playing in the background.

We get an early inkling of the problems to come when he describes his first bout of homesickness on a school trip to Torquay, when away from “mum and dad and my home and my sister and my cats and my stuff” he cried and cried and cried. Shortly afterwards, he asked his mum to take him home early from a cricket clinic in Cheltenham. Even at a young age, it seems, Trescothick could not bear to be away from things that were familiar and that comforted him.

Of course, this is not ideal for an international cricketer who might spend as much as seven months a year in a strange bed. But there were other complications, too: Hayley's postnatal depression; a near-fatal accident suffered by his father-in-law, which he viewed time and again on his laptop via newly-installed CCTV cameras; his children not recognising him when he got home, and the beggars in Baroda reducing him to tears. The stuff of life that most people get through, but that about 3 per cent to 6 per cent of the population cannot.

Once we get to Baroda, the end itself is inevitable but still sad. He tries to return to touring life, but can't, breaking down first in Sydney, from where he is flown home at the start of England's most recent Ashes tour, and then, most distressingly of all, when he cannot make himself board the plane for Somerset's pre-season tour to Dubai and is discovered by team-mates shrivelled up in a corner of Dixons in the duty-free area at Heathrow. This is where the book begins, and it is where Trescothick's international ambitions end.

Given the focus of the book, Trescothick the cricketer, as opposed to Trescothick the depressive, is a rather fringe figure. This is a shame because Trescothick was, is, a fine player and he played at an interesting time in English cricket as the national team morphed from moderate to very good in the space of a couple of years. Top players are rarely given to analysing their talent, and professional ghosts (the journalist Peter Hayter has worked on numerous books with, for example, Ian Botham and Phil Tufnell) are too often working to a template they have worked to before.

Accordingly, there is too little thought given to this transformation in fortunes and of the characters at the heart of it. What, for example, made Andrew Flintoff into an undeniably great cricketer for a two-month period against Australia? What was the bed-rock of Michael Vaughan's success as captain? There is just one snippet of Duncan Fletcher, the coach, when he made a minor technical adjustment that enabled Trescothick to rediscover his form in South Africa. Otherwise this man who was at the heart of England's revival comes across as insensitive and aloof. Why did the Ashes winning side go from champs to chumps in 18 months?

Other than moments of dark humour, such as when Peter Gregory, the England team doctor, tried his hand, unsuccessfully, at acupuncture, and when Trescothick was taken in by a fraudster of a hypnotist, this is a joyless book. There is little of the thrill of playing sport at the highest level, none of the humour, nor the fascinating details or character sketches of dressing-room figures that make a sporting life worthwhile.

Maybe this is part of the reason that Trescothick succumbed to depression, because his is a mind closed to the delights of life beyond cricket. And here is why the book must major on the depression in the first place, because otherwise there is little to say about Trescothick the man. We learn that he is from a cricket-obsessed family, became obsessed himself, was funnelled into the Somerset Academy at 16 and that's it. Life experience outside the game, as for so many of today's young sportsmen, absolutely nil.

So, when after a few years on the road he found that he could not cope with a life he had always wanted to lead, it is unsurprising that this unsettled him. Thankfully, Trescothick is on the mend now and enjoying his cricket for Somerset. But at some stage he will have to come to terms with the fact that his body won't allow him to do that for ever, either. If he is to cross that particular hurdle problem-free, he may want to have a think about who “me” really is.

Marcus Trescothick: Coming back to Me

£18.99 Offer Price to Times Readers £17.09 Buy the book

Times Recommends

• Why do Pynchon, Ballard and Wallace provoke such online loyalty?
• The Sunday Times 100 best holiday reads
• What will we be reading this summer: the booksellers predict