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Dernbach: I was with Tom Maynard on the night he died



Jade Dernbach has replayed the night that led to his friend Tom Maynard's death a thousand times in his head. And every time he has asked himself a heart-rending question: Was there any more I could have done to save him?

Maynard was 23 and one of cricket's brightest lights when he died on a railway line near Wimbledon Park station early one morning last June.

He, Dernbach and their Surrey team-mate Rory Hamilton-Brown had been for a night out in London. They had drunk alcohol to excess but what Dernbach says they did not know then was what the inquest into Maynard's death later revealed: Their friend had also taken cocaine and ecstasy in the hours before his death.



Tough time: England bowler Jade Dernbach

The revelation stunned cricket and prompted observers to ask whether a culture of recreational drug-taking might have found its way into the game.

In his first major interview since the death of his friend, Dernbach has insisted that he knew nothing of Maynard's drug habit - that all he had ever seen was a sublimely talented cricketer who seemed destined to follow his father Matthew and play for England.

Dernbach said: 'No matter how many times I go over that night, the fundamental thing is that everything we did - how we went out, the places we went - were things we'd done 10 times previously. It was just another night out with a couple of really close friends.

'I ask myself if I should have spotted something. Should I have seen the signs that Tommy was taking drugs? But in a professional environment you just don't think that sort of thing happens. Just because someone is a different character, do you have to say, "You're a bit extrovert, do you take drugs?" Where do you draw the line?

'People say, "Why didn't you know?" I understand that but hundreds of people came in contact with Tommy over his life and nobody knew. I don't know enough about drugs to understand what the signs are. If nobody else had an idea, why should I have done? I'd stood next to Tom and seen him do a drug test. It never entered my mind that he was taking anything.

'The coroner said at the inquest that drugs can affect people in different ways and maybe Tommy was one of those people it was just impossible to tell with. Maybe he was just more able to cope with it than most.'



Tragic: Tom Maynard

Seven weeks ago Dernbach and Hamilton-Brown, who rejoined his former county Sussex after being released from his contract at The Oval last September, gave evidence at the inquest into their friend's death at Westminster Coroner's Court. After eight months of soul-searching and emotional turmoil, it proved a cathartic process for both men.

'Inevitably at the inquest they were going to rake over everything,' said Dernbach. 'It was difficult to know people were going to judge Tommy without knowing him. I knew how much I was hurting, and then I thought about his family and you could times it by a thousand.

'For me the inquest was about making sure people remembered Tommy for who he really was. I wanted to give the best account for him. It wouldn't have bothered me in the slightest what people thought about me. I'm still here, you can judge me and I can still change people's perceptions. You can't do that if you're not here.'

The last time Dernbach saw Maynard alive he was singing, dancing and making his friends laugh. Apart from hitting a cricket ball, it was what the 23-year-old did best. Three hours later, he was dead, electrocuted on a railway track before being hit by a train.

Maynard had died after attempting to drive the four miles from his home in Wandsworth, which he shared with Hamilton-Brown, to visit his girlfriend, Carly Baker, in Wimbledon. It was a journey he never completed.

Alarmed after being stopped by police on suspicion of driving his Mercedes car while drunk, Maynard had run away. His flight from the law ended on that railway line. His body was found on the track near Wimbledon Park station in the early hours of June 18, 2012. He was pronounced dead at 5.41am.



Happy days: Dernbach and Maynard in action

'I'd gone to bed that night around 2.30 or 3am,' said Dernbach. 'I had training the next day with England so I'd decided enough was enough. I left people downstairs like I'd often done before. Tommy was still enjoying himself. He was in a great mood, having a sing and a little dance as he always did. Messing around.

'At around 6.45am I heard the doorbell go. At that point I was still a bit worse for wear and disorientated from the night before.

'Rory had gone to open the door. I heard a girl crying downstairs and thought "What's happening here?" I got out of bed and Rory came running up the stairs saying "Carly thinks something has happened to Tom". I went downstairs and Carly was on the sofa crying. She was hysterical.

'What do you do in that situation? The only thing we could think of was to get in the car and go and see what had happened. But then as we got in the car I thought, "I probably can't drive here". Rory called his mum and said, "We think something's happened to Tommy, can you take us?" So we got in the car and headed over towards Wimbledon.

'I was throwing 20 million questions around my head and saying to Rory, "Could this have happened or could that have happened?" We were trying to call Tommy's phone and I was texting him. The calls were going straight to answerphone and we were starting to panic.

'The longer we didn't hear from him the more we were thinking, "Something could be up here". But then it could have just been that Tommy had gone off to another party. That had happened plenty of times before. Tommy could have been asleep and his phone turned off.

'The battery was always running out on his phone and he was always having to plug his phone in the car to get a quick 10 minutes of juice, and then off he'd go. We were clinging to that.

'We kept saying to each other, "His phone's probably dead, he's at someone's house". That's when we got that phone call and the whole world came crashing down.'

The call came from Surrey chief executive Richard Gould, who had been notified by police that the body of a young man fitting Maynard's description had been found.



Sorrow: Girlfriend Carly Baker at his inquest

'The chief executive told us he had information to say that it probably was Tommy who'd been found,' said Dernbach.

'I didn't want to believe it. Even though Tommy was younger than me, I looked up to him as a hero. He was like Superman to me. I felt as if nothing could harm him.'

Slowly, the realisation that their friend was dead began to sink in. That afternoon Surrey's entire squad, along with director of cricket Chris Adams and his coaching staff, gathered at Hamilton-Brown's mother's house in Wandsworth. They shared stories about their team-mate and they cried.


Screening urged to counter drug use



Jade Dernbach has backed radical proposals to introduce hair testing in county cricket in order to identify recreational drug users following the death of Tom Maynard.

The Professional Cricketers' Association, in conjunction with the England and Wales Cricket Board, plan to screen all county cricketers 'at some stage this summer' in order to assess the scale of the problem in English cricket.

Toxicology reports submitted at the inquest into Maynard's death found levels of cocaine and MDMA - the base for ecstasy - which indicated he was a regular drug user. Urine tests designed to trace performance-enhancing drugs failed to detect any in Maynard and his close friend, Dernbach, believes it is time for a radical new approach.

'I'd welcome a lot more drug testing,' said Dernbach. 'If we can avoid this circumstance ever happening again then it will benefit everyone. Whether it be hair testing or more frequent testing, I think all professional sportsmen would welcome that into our game.


'It's important that lessons are learned from what happened to Tommy. It's important that clubs pay attention to the more personal side of players, not just as professionals but as human beings - understanding what everyone is going through. If that's the one lesson to come out, it is probably awareness.'

PCA chief executive Angus Porter says widespread screening of all county players is 'highly likely' to be implemented this summer. 'It is important to make it clear that we will not be looking to catch people out and punish them, but instead provide support for anyone with a problem,' said Porter.

'We are not talking about players cheating by using performance-enhancing drugs, we are talking about people who may have an addiction or other serious problem.'

Porter does not believe recreational drugs are endemic in cricket but wants to introduce widespread testing to understand the extent of drug use.

'Hair testing is the most effective way to identify use over an extended period of time,' he said.

'We needed to be together,' said Dernbach. 'Nobody knew how to take it so we just sat around telling stories about Tommy and having a cry together.

'When the police turned up that afternoon to take statements from me and Rory it made it very real. It was awful. 'I was going over and over in my mind what happened.

'Any normal night out you wouldn't think twice about going to the bar and getting four or five shots and having them with your friends. Then someone is asking, "Well, exactly how many drinks did you have?" You ask yourself, "Was something different?" You end up second-guessing yourself.

'It was just a normal night out which ended with the worst possible thing in the world happening.' The effect on the Surrey dressing room was seismic.

Ten years earlier the club had lost Ben Hollioake at the age of 24 in a car crash. Now they had lost another young star. For South-African born Dernbach, the rest of last summer passed in a blur, while England's winter tour to India also proved a tortuous experience.

'I wanted to get away from the confirmation that Tommy was dead,' said Dernbach. 'It felt like there was so much on top of me. I couldn't move, I couldn't think, I couldn't go two minutes without crying.'

HE admits that he returned to cricket before he was emotionally ready for it. 'I played for England in a Twenty20 game at Nottingham six days later, which was crazy really. My head was still so jumbled with what had happened. I couldn't concentrate. My head was all over the place. When things didn't go well I was just in bits. I tried to fight through and carry on. I ended up getting injured, which gave me a little bit of time away from the game and the spotlight. But my head was nowhere, I was fighting demons all the time.

'It was really hard and it continues to be hard. The whole of last summer and winter was a constant battle. I was breaking down on a regular basis.

'There was a point this winter when I was away with England, during the fourth one-day international in Mohali, when I just wanted to pack it in and come home. I had bowled a couple of pretty ordinary spells and my mind was in turmoil. I remember walking towards the boundary and thinking, "I could just keep on walking here, go to the airport and get on the first flight home". I'd had enough. I went back to the hotel that night and phoned home. I was an emotional wreck.

'At least now the inquest is over we can draw a line in the sand. There was a lot of doubt and inevitably people were asking questions and wanted to know what happened. For me, getting the inquest out of the way was an important part of the healing process.'

That healing process continues for everybody at Surrey, Dernbach included. The 27-year-old fast bowler, who has had Maynard's squad number, 55, tatooed on his chest, will always remember the fun-loving friend he left downstairs that fateful night.

'I will always remember Tommy as that fun person with the biggest smile on his face,' he said. 'That never changed from the moment I met him to the last night. The last picture I have in my mind is of him dancing with a massive smile on his face, doing what he did best - making other people have a good time as well as enjoying himself.

'That's my last memory of him. And I'm so glad it is because whatever has been said, it doesn't change who he was and what he gave to so many people.

'It's only been since the inquest that I've been able to start moving forward with my life.

'It's not a question of forgetting, because I'll never forget, but it's about slowly coming to terms with everything that's happened. The only thing that can make this easier is time.'

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