Patrick Foster

And I think everybody around me underestimates it at the time.

But not only was it sort of the first time in my life I'd ever been told I wasn't good enough at something, which I really didn't like.

It felt like my dream was over, that I was partly responsible for it.

But also...

My identity, I felt like I'd lost my identity completely.

All I ever thought I was going to be or who I was had now gone.

Felt like I'd let people down, let myself down.

And I really, really struggled to come to terms with it.

But because I'd never struggled with anything,

I didn't know how to deal with it.

I certainly didn't want to admit it.

I went back to university.

I pretended to people that ultimately I didn't care about my cricket career because I could go and do something else when actually deep down it was eating me alive.

And people talk about trauma when it comes to things like addiction and trauma means different things to different people.

But for me, that moment was defining because it,

it just changed my view on myself and everything really.

And I was fundamentally sort of angry, bitter and just really struggled.

Yeah, it was at that point that definitely my relationship with gambling changed because now gambling started to form a different part of my life because not only was it a way of sort of replicating the Russian buzz that I used to get from playing cricket and the feelings that sort of come with that, but also it became a real form of escapism.

It was a way of kind of just running away from the way I was feeling and

my emotions, because when I was gambling, I didn't have to think about anything else, didn't have to worry about anything else.