It is almost exactly, give or take a few weeks, 10 years since Jonathan Trott’s century on Test debut helped set up victory over Australia at The Oval. A win which ensured they won back the Ashes and which began that England side’s precipitous rise and fall – from world number one and away series wins in Australia and India to implosion Down Under in the pressure cooker of another Ashes whitewash four years later.

This on the surface is the subject matter of The Edge, a new documentary which charts that journey, but which also shows the side-effects that come from that relentless pursuit of success and the depth of the impact it can have on a sports star’s mental health.

Central to the film is Trott whose story, in the words of its director Barney Douglas, “loosely represented the rise and fall of that team, as well as being its really human element.” In a side containing once in a generation talents such as Alastair Cook and Kevin Pietersen, the latter having enough backstory to form the basis of an entire 12-part documentary series on his own, Trott was perhaps not the most obvious choice of focus, but proves an inspired one.

There is a charming, meticulous eccentricity to Trott when he is first introduced – as relayed by anecdotes from James Anderson and Stuart Broad early on in the film – from measuring his socks to fastidiously putting his playing kit on, so his well documented mental health problems further down the line are all the more affecting.

While this was an aspect of the story Douglas – who was England’s video producer from 2009 to 2013 – was well aware of, what he hadn’t originally anticipated was how much it applied to other members of the team as well. It is this, the human the cost of sustained sporting excellence, that is at the heart of the film.

“I thought mental health would always be a clear aspect as far as Trott was concerned,” says Douglas. “But I didn’t realise that [Steven] Finn and Monty [Panesar] would talk about it more and there’s other stuff as well that didn't make the final edit. I was quite surprised at how open the players were talking about it.”

There is a refreshing openness to the interviews, a world away from the usual fare of stilted media-trained answers from players, none more so than from Andy Flower, the driving force behind the successes of that era but therefore by extension also responsible for its fallout.

“That was probably my biggest surprise from all the interviews was how open Andy was to reflection and regret and things he would do again, things he wouldn’t do again,” says Douglas. “I just thought it showed him in such a good light that he was prepared to analyse his own part in that whole thing.

“The way he’s been portrayed up until this point has been quite one dimensional. There’s definitely an element that’s pretty scary to Andy Flower in my experience. He’s tough and he’s hard, but he’s a product of his background and he shows regret, and he shows humour and he shows all these different facets to what made him one of England’s best ever coaches – they wouldn’t have got to number one without him.

“That was another element, I wanted to show him as a rounded individual, not as a caricature that had been written about. And we obviously send him up a little at the beginning but then you start to realise he’s a human like anybody else.”

It is a Flower brainchild, a brutally intense special forces run camp in a German forest, which provides both the catalyst for the team bonding together so successfully, but also the beginning of the win at all costs mentality that would ultimately prove its downfall.

Douglas was there at the time filming for England, excerpts of which are shown: “Carnage. It doesn't really do it justice to be fair. It was a lot worse than how it came across. But I was on a high after it, obviously I didn’t have the physical exertions, so that helped! But I think it worked.”

From those never before seen snippets of film to the stylish gladiatorial depiction of the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the film offers a fascinating glimpse into what it entails being an international cricketer.

“This was about the England team, it had to be about what it meant to play at the top level and what you sacrifice to get there,” says Douglas. “For me that’s just trying to represent what it can be like at the top level in the top series, it can be really really brutal and if there’s any fragility in either your game or headspace then it’s going to get cracked wide open.”

On the eve of an Ashes series that comes hot on the heels of England’s thrilling, successful World Cup campaign, creating for some players an almost unending summer of intense competitive pressure, it is to be hoped that the lessons of the previous era have been learnt. You only need to watch the film to see just how bad things could be if they haven't.