White win ‘means the world’ to honest Cross

Former world champion opens up on mental health struggles after 3-1 victory

- Jonathan Liew

Rob Cross doesn’t want to say what he saw at the children’s hospital in Cologne a couple of weeks ago. Some of the stories were “horrific”, he confides, but in any case they’re not his stories to tell. All he knows is that he went along with a few other players, after appearing in an exhibition the previous night, and it changed him.

“You see what people are going through,” he says. “And it puts life in perspective for people whose lives are sort of OK. Whose kids are OK. Sometimes we have to find a bit of good. It made me realise how lucky I am in life. There’s always someone out there going through something worse than what you're going through. That’s why you need totalk”

And Cross wants to talk now, about what he’s been going through. Maybe the aftermath of a routine 3-1 second-round win against Ian White at the world championship is the right time to doit, and maybe itisn’t. He doesn’t want to get into the weeds of it, and he certainly doesn’t claim to have all the answers. But talking helped him, and so he reasons it might help someone else too.