Graham Thorpe: Rising from the Ashes

Graham Thorpe: Rising from the Ashes
Graham Thorpe

Graham Thorpe’s achievements on the cricket field contrasted wildly with his personal problems, where drink and depression combined to send him spiralling off the rails. This is his brutally honest life story, including his dramatic retirement from Test cricket, and updated to include England’s 2005 Ashes win, and his new coaching career.Graham Thorpe was one of the best batsmen in world cricket for more than a decade. Yet the national press hounded him as 'English cricket's most disturbed player' for pulling out of a series of tours and turning his back on the game more than once.With painful candour and often unexpected humour, Thorpe dissects his career in cricket and the inner recesses of his private life: the impact of his bitter divorce; the suicidal depression that afflicted him in his darkest hours; the reasons why he needed to 'save himself' by withdrawing from past England tours; the elation of his magnificent century on his comeback Test at the Oval in 2003; and his fresh outlook in life with a new partner after confronting his own failings and past troubles.Twelve years on from his Test debut against Australia, Thorpe took the decision to retire from international cricket after the disappointment of his controversial non-selection for the Ashes 2005 tour.With updated material on his coaching spell in Australia – where he gained valuable insight into cricket’s No 1 nation.

GRAHAM the autobiography

THORPE

RISING FROM THE ASHES

Graham Thorpe

with Simon Wilde

To my children Henry, Amelia, Kitty and Emma

Contents

Cover (#ud46f3347-72c3-5698-b0f1-d92faa05e5db)

Title Page (#ua940ba38-dab0-5cfe-8d1b-d1324735ccfa)

ONE: Incredible Journey

TWO: Sleepwalking

THREE: Clinging to the Cliff-Face

FOUR: I Don’t Like Cricket, I Hate It

FIVE: House of Cards

SIX: Learning From Lara

SEVEN: Pulling Out of Australia

EIGHT: No 1 Rebel

NINE: One-Night Stand

TEN: Salvation

ELEVEN: Clearance

TWELVE: England Again

THIRTEEN: Resurrection

FOURTEEN: Boxing Days

FIFTEEN: Payback in the Caribbean

SIXTEEN: The Magnificent Seven

SEVENTEEN: Fathers 4 Justice

EIGHTEEN: Grit and Glory

NINETEEN: Ashes … to Ashes

TWENTY: Sydney, March 2006

Index

Photographic Acknowledgements

Graham Thorpe’s Career in Figures

Copyright

About the Publisher

ONE Incredible Journey (#u97860d66-9998-5502-be68-d66bfd7fb934)

I DON’T THINK I’m a typical professional sportsman. I wear my heart on my sleeve more than most. I’m emotional and sensitive, though sport has taught me when to be tough, but my life has not been all about cricket. In my heart I often put family first, and I am not sure that’s usual in sport.

Being harsh on myself, I’d say I was selfish in my early career. There were times when I got wrapped up in my own game. In fact I saw a certain amount of that selfishness in some of the early teams I played in at Surrey in the 1990s and, when I started with England against Australia in 1993, the need to make sure you were a success was intensified because many of us lived under the cloud of ‘two bad Tests and you’re out’. That also created an unhealthy environment, and not everyone wanted to play for England then. It could be an unpleasant, intimidating experience. And not everyone in the team was always happy for you when you did well.

The whole ethos of the junior cricket and football I played, and the one taught me by my father, was that the beer tasted sour in the evening if you’d lost, however well you’d done yourself. But I stuck to the belief that if I was going to go down, it would be on my terms. I wasn’t going to be fearful of failure, or be seduced into trying to be stylish for the sake of it, or intimidated into playing a cautious game. I never thought of myself as having a lot of talent. I learned how to survive at the crease, then to score runs.

I was very lucky in my cricket. With both county and country I survived to enjoy happier times when there was a lot of collective success, and the winning became more important than personal achievement. That is a rare state to achieve. In my final 18 months with the England team, it was a privilege to be part of such a successful, stable and selfless side. The cynicism had gone. Now everyone shared in everybody else’s success. It was a much happier dressing-room.

WHEN I WAS YOUNGER, I was proud of playing cricket for England but found myself operating like a bank, churning out money for my family against the day I finished. I was desperate to do well, but didn’t enjoy it as much as I should have done. I didn’t give very much as a person in those days. I was shy and uncommunicative. Ultimately it didn’t create happiness, and there came a time when I would have given back all my Test runs and Test caps to be happy again.

I don’t think I’m a difficult person but I’ll stand up and say what I think. Some people mistook my inability to wear the right kit as subversion, whereas it was mere disorganization, but I really was quite antiestablishment in my younger days. I was a kid, and kids inevitably mess up, and to make matters worse I didn’t always see managers actually doing what they were supposed to do — manage. You’d be amazed how many people in authority didn’t really understand those under them. For my part, as I grew up, I learned it was better to face up to things than grumble about them.

Naturally, I’d dreamed of finishing my England career with an Ashes Test on my home ground of the Oval — who wouldn’t? — but, as I well know, life doesn’t always work out the way you’d like. I had no hard feelings about being dropped for the start of the 2005 series. The better England had got, the harder selection had become, and I appreciated that they were striving to improve in any way they could.

Having sunk to a place from which I thought I would never pick myself up — after my depression and traumatic divorce and the drinking — I’m more careful now. When you’ve been hit by a juggernaut, you tend to look left and right. But I’m still basically a trusting person. If you can’t come to terms with what’s happened to you, you can never be happy.

When I look back to how things were a few years ago — after I’d tried to retire from the game and was cracking up, refusing to go out, getting paranoiac, desperately missing my children, battered by journalists and bills from the divorce lawyers, shocked by my wife’s lies in the Sunday papers — it seems incredible that things turned round the way they did, both in my personal life and in cricket, in such a short space of time. I expected nothing, but found redemption twice over. I’ve made mistakes in my life, but came to realize that that doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person. What has happened to me in the last few years has changed me. I’m more appreciative of life now and try to enjoy every day. I guess I’ve mellowed a bit. Having gone through some very bad times, I feel I’ve come through a better person.

TWO Sleepwalking (#u97860d66-9998-5502-be68-d66bfd7fb934)

I FIRST gave up cricket three years ago. I remember it was July 2002 after the Lord’s Test against India, but that’s practically where my sure grasp of the facts stops. I was in a zombie state at the time, and my mind is blank about many things in that terrible period. Perhaps I couldn’t fully acknowledge it then, but I was going through a mental breakdown.

England played very well in that match, but when I think about that Test it feels as though we lost. The only fragments of memory I can dredge up about the rest of the guys are that it was Simon Jones’ first Test, Nasser Hussain got a hundred, and we won quite comfortably on the last day after India were left chasing a big score. When I think of what I did, I see myself as another person, someone I am watching on TV — not me, Graham Thorpe. It wasn’t me playing in that match, it was someone else. I was in another place altogether and it wasn’t nice, believe me. My state of mind all through that game was just down, down, down. I had become so depressed I was incapable of making a decision about anything. I was walking around in a heavy black fog. I think I’d reached rock bottom.

To say I was going through a messy divorce is an understatement. I had separated from my wife Nicky the previous year, but for months had kidded myself that we would eventually get back together. I suppose I had been in denial about the possibility that it might be permanent. It had been easy to persuade myself that things were not really as bad as they were because I’d carried on playing cricket. I’d spent much of the previous winter of 2001–02 touring Zimbabwe, India and New Zealand, so in that sense life had been pretty normal. I had told myself I was just spending time apart from Nicky and our two children, Henry and Amelia (who were then five and three), whom she’d taken with her, because that’s what I spent a lot of my life — too much of my life — doing. Being apart from them, playing cricket.