At the cliff's edge: Brendan Taylor's descent, surrender and return

Some time towards the end of 2021, a part of Brendan Taylor died. The loss was agonising for an overly proud 35-year-old - so painful, in fact, that he had allowed it to drag him into a spiral of addiction that drew the walls of his life in ever tighter, suffocating any sense that he could live without it. This inner delusion was in itself creating a tangled web of dilemmas in his external world.

"It was like trying to unscramble a scrambled egg every day," Taylor recalls of his state of mind back in 2020 and 2021, as he tried to juggle the demands of alcohol and cocaine addictions with an international career, as well as an ICC investigation into whether he had reported a match fixing approach in good time.

"People ask me how that felt, and the only way I could describe that was: every day, I either woke up feeling like I was mourning a death, or like maybe I had killed someone. Thank God I've never done that, but I don't know how else to explain it because I was such a proud person and cricket was my life, and now the whole world was going to know who I am and what I've been up to, and I didn't know how to deal with that. So although alcohol and cocaine were my problem, it got so bad that it actually became my solution to life.

"It was a very delusional way of thinking because without that I was absolutely convinced I could not go forward in the day. So I had to sort of numb myself pretty much daily, because that feeling of waking up and facing the potential consequences was too much. I've taken lots of stuff on the chin before but that one was just unbearable. So that's the only way I could mask it really, until it obviously became unsustainable."

Taylor's final stand to defend the fateful part came in September 2021 when, out of the blue, he announced his retirement. At that stage an ICC ban was inevitable, and he had failed a drugs test after losing control of his cocaine habit. Previously he had scaled back his use of the substance around match times to avoid detection, but now his need for escape was so strong that he was taking too much to clear out of his system. His family knew nothing about these troubles, and retirement felt like the only way to avoid some repercussions and perhaps retain the dignity of his career and their name.

It's not difficult to understand why Taylor's reputation and career felt like everything to him. As we speak over a video call, the walls behind him are covered with cricket memorabilia from his time in both the international and English county games: lots of signed bats, shirts from significant victories, newspaper boards, a collage of him celebrating some of his 17 international centuries.

It was always going to be this way for Taylor - right from his early days. We attended Lilfordia School together, a junior boarding school on a farm near Harare that wore its enthusiasm for sport - and particularly cricket - on its sleeve. At the time we were there, the son of the family that owned and ran the school, Alistair Campbell, was captain of an increasingly successful national team. The school's connection to the game extended to its instrument for meting out corporal punishment: a miniature cricket bat named 'Lord Charles'.

Taylor was two years younger than me but because of his natural talent as a wicketkeeper and batter, he was elevated to the first team in my senior year. Captained by Malcolm Waller, who went on to play 14 Tests and 111 white-ball games for Zimbabwe, we won the national knockout competition that year.

If Taylor's cricket abilities were obvious, so was the absence of any academic inclinations. His trajectory was best elucidated when his 'O' Level results came out in 2002, when he was 16 - he scraped a pass in just four subjects. "I'm so disappointed and worried, Brendan. What are we going to do about you?" his mother Deborah said to him. It was up to his father, Graham, to provide the calming presence and some clear direction: "Best you get back in the nets, my boy."

"That was pretty much ingrained in me from a young age, and it's all I've been pretty good at or aspired to get better at," Taylor says now. "So I haven't diversified or anything. I've stayed pretty true to cricket."

This added to the stakes as the ICC's corruption unit loomed over him, brandishing questions about why he had failed to disclose his exchange with a group of mischievous Indian 'businessmen'. That took place in 2019 when he travelled to India to discuss a potential T20 tournament, as well as personal sponsorship. Taylor was gifted $15,000 at the time, but the trouble really grew when he accepted an offer of cocaine during an evening in their company. It was a set-up. The next morning they barged into his hotel room with footage they had taken of him consuming the drug, and threatened to make it public unless he fixed future matches for them. Given that Taylor had kept his habit so secretive - not even his close family knew about it - he found himself in their pocket.

While he never went on to fix any element of a match, the encounter was the straw that broke the camel's back, sending him into a spiral. That said, Taylor can see the bigger picture of his addictions now.

"I mean it's a funny one," he says. "You know, when I went into rehab in January 2022, I was convinced that trip - the fatal trip to India - had made me this alcoholic and addict. But when I actually did my (recovery) programme and did an inventory on it and spoke to my sponsor, there was a trail of destruction throughout my career in terms of these little moments that identified that I certainly had a drinking problem or at times a drug problem."

Some of those had been public moments. Like the time that Taylor was found asleep in a stranger's car in Nottingham, the morning after he had been celebrating a win for the county. The incident reflected two tendencies in Zimbabwe culture: to drink too much and celebrate it, as I remember Zimbabweans doing on social media at the time; and to display good manners (Taylor was "extremely apologetic" to the vehicle's owner and even offered to get the car valeted).

Zimbabwe's drinking culture is something that Taylor has redefined as problematic since undergoing the 12-step recovery programme, but he also tends to take responsibility for his own part in it rather than blaming his tendencies on the wider culture.

"What I could do is I could stop for periods but I could never really stay stopped," he reflects. "You know, I was a bit of an extremist in a way, where I could really train when it was time to train, and when there was a series that was finished then I would sort of burn the candle at both ends. That's how I lived my life.

"How these things happen, I cannot tell you. I mean it's not like I came from a destructive family. I've had an amazing job, wonderful relationships with my parents and my brothers. I have four beautiful children. But I know I have this gene inside of me when I ingest that sort of thing. I'm vulnerable to that ease and comfort of it, and I could never accurately predict how much I was going to use or drink. Generally when I started, all bets were off and it was very hard to stop. I had to go the whole way."

Taylor recognises there was also circumstance. I put it to him that he never had to work particularly hard to get into the Zimbabwe team - the opportunity was offered to him as an 18-year-old when 15 white players went on strike to protest the board's selection policies - and Taylor agrees. Earning the right to represent his country through years of graft in domestic cricket would have been beneficial - as would the mentorship of some senior players.

"Looking back, as an 18-year-old coming into a little bit of money, there was no guidance," he says. "I'm not blaming this, because I would probably have fallen into this eventually, but there was no guidance on finance and investing your money. I guess as a young kid, your ego is through the roof and you put yourself on this pedestal because you're an 18-year-old kid on TV. I'd love to give that kid a good smack around the ear now. You live in a sort of bubble of, 'Well, cricket's part of my life. It's always going to be there.' And then they always say, 'Enjoy your career. It goes by very fast.' And it sure did. Before you know it, you've got the three-and-a-half-year ban (from the ICC) and it's all over. And you think, 'Wow, what do I do now?'

"But somehow through going through depression and alcohol and substance abuse, your past becomes your greatest asset. I'm certainly seeing that now. It's not about anything materialistic or money or whatever, it's about being present with your family and loved ones, and building these friendships and fellowships that are taking place in Zimbabwe for alcohol and drug abuse. To be helping others in that field, because it is a big problem. Yeah, that's a pretty powerful way to be. Not some idiot on TV with an ego the size of the Empire State building."

Taylor claims that ego was "absolutely shattered" during his three-month rehabilitation programme in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe, which began after he finally admitted his problem to his family. He says he had kept it from them for years, believing that he could never ask for help, until "surrender" ultimately saved his life.

"You're at the edge of the cliff and you don't know where to go anymore," is how he describes it. "You're absolutely convinced no one can help you. You know, I come from a loving and very proud family. I was too ashamed to tell them what was going on. And so I started to live a very toxic, selfish, self-centred lifestyle that was starting to overflow and affect the people who are nearest and dearest around me. Until you hit that incomprehensible demoralisation and you've got nowhere else to go. You have to surrender otherwise you're probably going to die. Fortunately when I did reach out, there was an overwhelming amount of help. My family didn't know how to get me better. They just flew in formation and we got into it straight away."

Just as his father had helped to develop his career, attending all of his early international games, so he delivered Brendan to the next stage of his life, driving him the four hours to the rehabilitation centre.

"I was a bit apprehensive, I didn't know what to expect, but I had an open mind and a huge amount of willingness to go to any lengths," Taylor recalls of his journey into rehab. "I took a drive out there with my old man and we chatted about, you know, just fun memories we had together. It was a beautiful time together, until we turned left in Rusape and there was this big newspaper board in the town, about a metre by a metre, and it just said: 'Taylor Involved in Cocaine Scandal'. My old man sort of caught the giggles and I thought, 'Wow, you know the reality is the reality. We're going off, I'm going to get better, why harp on about it?' That sort of broke the ice. I just knew he had my back, and he left me with these words that I'll never forget. He just said: 'Love you; failure is not an option.' I understood what he meant."

Perhaps aided by his "extremist" tendencies, Taylor would go much further than completing the 90 days at the centre, and the ongoing programme with his sponsor. Inspired by his own experience, and seeing Zimbabwe's drinking and drugs culture for what it is - "an epidemic of addiction," as he calls it - he helped to raise funds so that his sponsor could open a male-only rehabilitation centre. Serial fundraiser David Houghton, who walked from Bulawayo to Harare in the 1990s to raise money for a cricket academy, got behind the cause of the Walk4Recovery initiative, along with Zimbabwe's national rugby team. The new centre is now open.

Fundraising for different initiatives gave Taylor some purpose - along with his younger brother Keegan, he also raised money for children with cleft lips to get surgery. And then cricket started coming back in. After building a two-lane net facility in his garden, Taylor began offering private coaching on top of the time he spent throwing balls to his boys. Eighteen months after completing his rehab, and with two years left to run on the ICC ban, he went to see Zimbabwe Cricket's managing director Givemore Makoni, to talk about his coaching prospects once he had served his time.

Taylor says Makoni stopped him in his tracks. "He said to me, 'No, BT, you can coach until you're 60. We have the 2027 World Cup coming up and we're hosting it. You know, we need some experienced guys in and around the group, and it's imperative that you come back and play.' I realised I had played the last few years of my career as a fractured and broken human being. Now I've got this mental clarity, got rid of the fog. It planted a seed and I really started to buy into the training, my dieting, getting fitter.

"I'm lighter now than I was as an 18-year-old now. It's bizarre. I was always 10, 12, 15 kilos overweight my whole career. So I just feel like I'm moving better. I can bat for longer. I can train longer. The skills have come back fairly quickly and I'm just always trying to enhance them every day. Both the chairman of Zimbabwe Cricket and the MD backed me wholeheartedly, and that shifted my mindset, and then I went all in with it. My days now are more focused around service - making up for time that I'd stolen from my children, my wife, and my employer Zimbabwe Cricket."

A healthier, fitter Taylor is now back in a much healthier Zimbabwe setup. Having taken the steps required to clear the debts that crippled the organisation throughout the years that Taylor represented them, ZC has been gradually growing the game at all levels. The national team is busier than ever, and has the support that was lacking for so long.

"I've never seen it run so smoothly," says Taylor. "Everything from the coaching staff that we have right now, the professionalism, there's no real cutting of costs - everything's there. Where previously we used to get a banana and a bottle of water at training, now there's protein powders and the sort of things you need to fuel your body."

Now 39, Taylor can't tell how long he will play for. Next up are the T20 World Cup qualifiers, which Zimbabwe are hosting. Having missed out on qualifying for the last tournament, there is natural determination to seal a place in India next year. Thereafter, time will tell.

"I don't even know what's happening tomorrow," says Taylor, "but what I will do today or tonight is give thanks for what I have, and try and wake up tomorrow again with an overwhelming amount of gratitude. Who can I help out? Put my best foot forward and try and get better at cricket, or help someone in the nets. Then if I do that, I know I've done the best that I can do. If I get to the 2027 World Cup, absolutely that's a goal. But who knows? It's really just a day at a time. I'm just blown away how I've managed to get my life back on track, and so I just keep my feet on the ground and plod along."