Graham Thorpe: Rising from the Ashes

I did play one more big innings, though, before that India Test at Lord’s, and it was another of those times during this period when finding a partner to bat with — Matthew Hoggard, our No 11, in the second Test against Sri Lanka at Edgbaston in June — took my mind off things, and briefly enabled me to function again. Once I got a feel for an innings and a situation, I could still do it, but it was very sporadic.

We were well in control by the time I went out to bat late on the second day. Inspired by some high-quality bowling from Andrew Caddick, we’d bowled out Sri Lanka for 162 and a big stand from Trescothick and Butcher had helped push us to 176 in front when I went out to bat. It was another of those times when it would have been easy to give it away, but the pitch was quiet and we wanted a big lead otherwise it was quite possible Sri Lanka would bat their way out of trouble. A steady trickle of wickets at the other end helped concentrate my mind and, when Hoggard walked out with a bat in his hand not long before lunch the next day, I was still there, on 61, having seen six partners depart.

A lot was in our favour — Muttiah Muralitharan, Sri Lanka’s match-winning bowler, was not fully fit — but it was still an amazing partnership. So much went as planned. I think Hoggie and I stayed together for 30 overs, and we controlled the strike so well that in all but one over I was on strike for the first ball. It really demoralized the fielders. Not that Hoggie was a mug with the bat; as he was quick to tell everyone, a couple of years after this he almost scored a century for Yorkshire as night-watchman. His talent was just keeping things simple: blocking, leaving, trying nothing fancy. By the end, I was happy to let him face most of the over, and overall I think he took slightly more of the strike than I did during our partnership.

We had some fun setting ourselves targets, 10 runs at a time, his score, my score, our partnership. By talking us through things, I managed to keep us focused. In the end, I was out first, cutting high to third man, but by that point I’d got 123 and was pretty happy with what we’d achieved. We’d built up a lead of almost 400, and it was enough to set up a commanding win.

It was great to escape the reality of my personal situation for as many hours as I could manage on the pitch. It’s funny, but I found myself relaxed and feeling more in control during that innings than I had felt for weeks off the pitch. My mind had been doing strange things to me. I was in increasingly bad shape, physically and mentally. I began to question the point of my playing cricket. When men went out to work, they did it for their families, and that became their motivation. I didn’t want to play just for myself. I thought, ‘Yeah, well, you may have just got a Test hundred against Sri Lanka, but did it really give you a lift?’ And the answer was, ‘No it didn’t.’ As soon as the applause stopped and I came off the field, I felt empty inside. I needed the happiness of a family to go back home to if my cricket was to have a purpose. I was desperately missing my children.

My condition wasn’t helped by an incident before the next Test against Sri Lanka, at Old Trafford, when I tripped over Michael Vaughan. We were playing a warm-up game of football and I badly hurt my ankle. I still played in the Test but there was a lot of bruising, and I wasn’t fit going into the triangular one-day series that preceded the Tests with India. I only played a few times, missing an epic final against India when we scored a massive 325 but still lost.

Even before the problems began with Nicky, I had talked to Nasser and Duncan about the possibility of retiring from one-day cricket, telling them that something had to give because I was on the road too much. But the truth was that by this stage I was so messed up I wasn’t practising hard or training at all. Sometimes you can get away with a few things in Test cricket, but in the one-day game you can’t get away with anything. You’ve got to be very agile in the field, and I knew how the coach viewed one-day cricket. Duncan wanted energy and athletes, not some bloke whose mind kept drifting off and who wasn’t working at his game.

On the day of the final, I publicly announced I was giving up one-day cricket. The press release said something about me wanting to spend more time sorting out my private life, which was true, but whatever the outcome this was a permanent decision. The next World Cup was only a few months away but I wasn’t coming back. I was done and dusted with one-day cricket.

I remember standing with Marcus Trescothick on the outfield for the presentation ceremony that evening. In his enlightened state — he’d scored a brilliant hundred that afternoon — he could see that, all right, we’d lost, but it had been a great final, in front of a full house at Lord’s. ‘Thorpey,’ he asked in his Cornish accent, ‘You’re going to give all this up, are you? You don’t want to do this any more? Don’t you think you’ll miss it?’

Maybe that showed how other people can’t see what’s going on inside you. But maybe it also summed up what a poor state I was in; over the years I’d had so much enjoyment out of cricket, the winning, the losing, the camaraderie, but now I just couldn’t see the point. I could no longer feel a thing.

‘Tres, mate,’ I replied, ‘I couldn’t give a fuck.’

But if I thought retiring from one-day cricket would help keep me together, I didn’t know how low I’d become. All I could see was pain and heartache. Sport could not provide me with an escape any longer. Walking away altogether was going to be pretty embarrassing but, by the later stages of the Lord’s Test match against India, which came just two weeks after that one-day final, that was my over-riding desire. I just didn’t want to be in the spotlight any more. I’d been an England cricketer for nine years and now it was enough.

All sorts of things were buzzing through my head but, increasingly, I was having these fantasies. ‘I’m going to leave the country. I’ll go to America and start a new life.’ I found it hard to imagine still living in England. And I think I would have left but for the fact it would obviously have made seeing Henry and Amelia all the more harder, if not impossible. And, crazy though it sounds, I hadn’t given up on Nicky having me back.

FOUR I Don’t Like Cricket, I Hate It (#u97860d66-9998-5502-be68-d66bfd7fb934)

THINGS DIDN’T get better after the Lord’s Test against India in July 2002, they got worse. Much worse. In my new state of ‘retirement’, I found myself with even more time to spend in the family home near Epsom Town, a bloody great pile with five bedrooms and a big garden in the middle of nowhere and just me rattling around inside, me and my tortured thoughts. It might have been an expensive house in a desirable area, but it felt to me like an open prison. I started referring to the house as Colditz.

Nicky and I had bought it in the summer of 2001 intending it to be our dream home, but that idea soon became a sick joke. Many bad things happened in that house as it became the central battleground between the two of us after Nicky announced she wanted a separation. It may be an exaggeration to say that that house ruined everything for us, but it seemed that everything took a turn for the worse after we left our previous house in Ewell.

When I went to Zimbabwe in 2001, it was the first time Nicky had been alone in the new house for any length of time and she didn’t like it. I can remember once speaking to her on the phone from Zimbabwe and she said something about how Kieron — who’d just split up from his girlfriend, as it happened — had come over because she was scared of being in the house on her own. Of course, at that point I’d not twigged what was going on, but that house had helped bring them together.

My god, that house. I hate to think about it. This was the house from which Nicky practically tried to exclude me after she first said she wanted to separate. She rarely wanted me in the house at the same time as her, so we alternated periods of staying there, taking it in turns to look after the children, and when I was the one meant to stay away — which was a lot of the time — I was at a loss as to what to do.

This went on for most of the month I was at home between the Zimbabwe and India tours, and I found myself virtually homeless. There were not that many people I felt I could turn to. I knew it was a situation that only myself and Nicky could really sort out. I spent some time at my parents’ house and also with Alistair Brown. Basically, I was living out of my car. I carried around with me two or three bags of clothes, sometimes washing them at home, sometimes at my parents and sometimes Alistair’s wife Sarah was doing a bit of washing for me. It was a pathetic existence, but I guess it’s not that uncommon when you separate.

I spent god knows how many hours just driving around, without knowing where I was going. I can remember once being behind the wheel, thinking, ‘Where in fuck’s name are you driving? You can’t go back to your house because Nicky’s there. You can’t go to your parents’ house because they’re probably not in … You’ve got nothing to fall back on. Nothing. What are you going to do?’ Occasionally, I’d go and see a couple of mates, mates who’ve since said to me, ‘Christ, you were a mess at that stage. Totally lost.’

Then, one night during this period, I’d been over at a friend’s house, where I think I’d been drinking, and I was on my way back to Brownie’s house. But between these two places was my house, and all of a sudden I was doing the thing you should never do and slowing up outside to have a look, seeing what’s going on. It was around lam and, sure enough, there was Kieron’s car parked in my drive. I’m thinking to myself, ‘I only bought this house two months ago and now I’m in my car outside looking in and there’s this bloke inside …’

My first thought was to do his car over. But then I thought, ‘No. Christ. Criminal damage.’ So I got out of my car, walked up to the house and rang the door bell. God knows what I was planning on doing or saying, but I was in a dream-like state, and it felt like I had no control. Eventually, Nicky opened it.

‘Right,’ I announced. ‘I want to come in, thanks very much. This is my house. I’m coming in.’ Nicky said, ‘Fuck off,’ as I suppose you would at that time of night. I ignored her. ‘This is my house,’ I said. ‘I’ve bought it with my hard-earned money. I’m going to spend the night here, thanks very much.’ Looking back, I was almost in an hysterical state.

At this point Kieron came down the stairs drawling in his South African accent, ‘Nah, let ‘im in.’ Well, I’m thinking to myself, you’re hardly going to say anything else, are you, given that you are actually in my house. I walked in. I was struggling to control myself, but even in my highly agitated state I was aware that the children were asleep upstairs. Probably in an attempt to calm me down, Nicky suggested we talk about things and we all trooped through to the kitchen. It was completely surreal. Unsurprisingly the discussion went nowhere and we quickly ended up just shouting at each other. Then I turned on Kieron, this bloke I’d entertained in my home with his girlfriend at various times over the previous year, and who was now carrying on as though he owned the place, and told him to get out. Nicky said he couldn’t go because he had been drinking. So I started screaming: ‘He’s fucking getting out of here! Get him out of here! Now!’ I think Nicky could see I was in a desperate state and eventually she told him to leave. Suddenly I felt completely drained, exhausted. I started to feel sick and weak and stumbled off to the spare room. I still have no idea why I went there that night, and what I hoped to achieve, but driving by and seeing Kieron’s car outside just made something inside me snap.

What hurt most, I think, was that I felt totally betrayed by the people close to me. The month before we bought the new house, I had given Nicky a new car. It became pretty clear that she had worked out precisely when was financially the most advantageous time to leave. As it turned out, Nicky left me just as the last cheque from my benefit year had cleared.

My wish to escape public attention by stepping down from cricket in the summer of 2002 was not immediately granted. The newspapers wanted to know all about what was wrong with this bloke who had run away from his job. I was back on the front pages again, just as I had been when I rushed home from India. All I could say to them was that I was in a bad state, and trying to sort it out. Some of them wrote that I was having a breakdown. Probably, yes, I was; but I didn’t actually want to admit to it in a newspaper. The attention only made me more reclusive and soon enough I was left alone to do what I’d said I wanted to do when I announced I was stepping down from cricket — concentrate on my family. I now had time to do that for hours on end, focussing on what had gone wrong and what I was missing.

Seeing the children were bitter-sweet times. In happier days, I could obviously take Henry and Amelia out of the house no questions asked, down to the shops, on a bike ride or to the swimming pool, but now all these things had to be painfully negotiated and without the co-operation of Nicky they were next to impossible to make happen. While I was allowed to see the children from time to time, it was not always in the way I wanted. I always felt she was in control.

What I found hardest to comprehend about her attitude was that she wanted to take away the special relationship between me and my children. Fortunately, Amelia was not yet three and perhaps too young to know what she was missing but Henry, at five, was not. I’m sure he must have been desperate for me to watch him play football more often than I could, or for more of our trips down to the driving-range.

Basically I was on my own. I had effectively cut myself off from cricket and soon found that all those people on Nicky’s side, who I had thought were friends, had turned away. I was left to rely heavily on my parents, although that was not easy as there had been a time when I’d not spoken to them for two or three years at the start of my marriage because Nicky hadn’t got on with them. Unbeknown to me, she had written to my parents a few weeks after our wedding saying how awful they were, that they’d spoilt the wedding day — she even called my father a philistine! — and she said she wanted nothing more to do with them. It put me in an impossible situation, and I ended up siding with Nicky which created a rift with my parents, something I really regret now. I was so grateful to find that they were there for me at this time. It was quite a humbling experience.

A few friends in cricket kept in touch, but only a few like Mark Butcher and Ray Alikhan, and I noted those who didn’t. I first met Ray, who had been my best man, in my second season at Surrey. He had joined us from Sussex. He was a few years older and we couldn’t have been more different. He was this elegant, princely figure while I was this terrier-like bloke with no style whatsoever, but we just gelled. He’d summoned me to bowl at him in the nets. ‘Old boy, come over and throw some to me, will you?… Just bowl them nice and short.’ And he just kept pulling me away for miles. We sometimes trained together and, when he was let go by Surrey a few years later, we carried on training and playing squash together. He said that I had helped him then, and I was grateful for his support now.

Butch and I went back a long way. I first remember him as an 18-year-old with a big hairdo, strolling out at No 9 to join me in a Sunday league match at the Oval and almost pulling off an amazing victory by smashing a quick 40-odd. He was three years younger than me and saw me, he once said, as something of a role model, but the respect was always mutual. As fellow lefthanders, I suppose we had a natural affinity. Socially, we weren’t that close to start with. I kept myself to myself in those days, and was notorious for being unable to remember people’s names. I was pretty wrapped up in my cricket and spent an unhealthy amount of time thinking about it. Butch always had a better perspective on things and thought nothing of a night out. I came to realize that it wasn’t a bad thing to chill out now and again, and by the end I reckoned I was as close to Butch as to anybody I’d known in cricket.

There were, though, times when outside circumstances put our friendship under strain. Our wives — Butch was married to Alec Stewart’s sister Judy — did not hit it off (but then come to think of it, on looking back, Nicky didn’t hit it off with many people). That made things difficult for a while, and we also had a period of a few months when we didn’t speak after Butch was named stand-in England captain ahead of me during the home series with New Zealand in 1999.

That was a complicated situation. I was going through a bad patch with the England management, which ought to have made it no surprise that they chose someone else, but I was annoyed because in the previous game at Lord’s, when Nasser had left injured, he put me in charge. When Nasser was ruled out of the next Test in Manchester, the selectors opted to give the captaincy to Butch. Given that the two ex-captains in the side, Atherton and Stewart, were reluctant to lead again, I was the senior available pro. There was really no reason to hold anything against Butch — it wasn’t his fault he was chosen — but I behaved in a pretty shitty way throughout the Test at Old Trafford. I should have accepted the situation but didn’t and my attitude was poor. All in all, I behaved pretty childishly, in retrospect.

Butch was having his own problems at that time which plunged his life into the sort of crisis mine was now in. His marriage to Judy was breaking down. Like me, he started to drink more and his game began to collapse under the strain. I wasn’t on the 1999–2000 tour of South Africa when his struggles really began, but well remember one day the next spring him throwing his bat down during a net session at the Oval, and slumping onto the ground in tears. We hadn’t spoken for a long time but I went up to him and asked him if he was all right and he told me what had happened. The time to mend bridges was long overdue. I told him that I was sorry there had been problems between us and said that if there was anything I could do to help him I would gladly do it.

It was an important day in our relationship, and after that we grew a lot closer. He lost his England place for a year but came back strongly against Australia in 2001 and established himself as the side’s No 3. So, when my problems started, Butch recognized the situation straightaway and gave me encouragement and advice. But there was only so much others could do. When I did occasionally go out socializing I wasn’t really there. I was still low and lost in my thoughts.

God knows how many days I spent in that house, staring at the walls, each numbing day indistinguishable from the next. The soul-searching now began in earnest. What exactly was I going to do? As Duncan Fletcher had said, I had to do something, but I ended up doing very little except getting wasted on my own every night. Each night I might drink three or four glasses of wine, though perhaps once a week it might be a bottle of Jack Daniels instead. It was the booze that really affected me. It would make me wake up in the night with my mind buzzing.

I was trying to come to terms with what had happened. Deep down, I still wanted to get everything back — my marriage, my children — and was trying to figure out how it might happen. But Nicky, who was enjoying being in control of the situation, seemed to have no intention of taking me back. She knew I was unhappy and struggling to cope, but showed little sympathy. In fact, she gave the impression she was loving every minute of it.

As a sportsman in self-imposed exile, I felt completely lost. My career was gone, my reputation ruined. All of a sudden I was in the position where I was being labelled a loser. Along with the loss of my children, I was mourning the loss of my place in the world, my identity. Retirement is something all sportsmen have to cope with, but that doesn’t make it any easier when it happens.

And in that scary state, removed from the public spotlight, I began to think that although there were things about cricket I missed, there were also things about it I hated. I looked back on my career and thought of all the sacrifices I’d made.

There’s this image some people have that playing cricket for England is one long party, interrupted by a few matches at glamorous locations. If it was like that in the old days when touring was more leisurely, it certainly isn’t now. God knows how many lonely, anxious nights I spent in hotel rooms in strange cities preparing for the next day’s Test match. It was often bloody hard, but I used to rationalize it by telling myself this is what I had to do. I was earning a living to support my family, and it made me proud to be able to do that. That was what got me out of bed in the morning; it motivated me.

Now things looked different. What had I gone through all that shit for? For this? Was this how it was all to end? A divorce and my life splashed over the newspapers? That was not what I thought I was buying into. Nicky had always complained about my cricket taking me away from home for such extensive periods, and, for a long time, I felt very guilty about it and my attitude almost became ‘I shouldn’t be doing this, it’s not good.’ Perhaps that’s partly why I gave up.

I looked at cricket and reflected that the game had done me over. I’d dedicated so much of my life to it and it had bitten me on the arse. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized what cricket had not done for me. It had not, for instance, taught me many ‘life skills’ during 15 seasons as a professional. It had taught me about playing the game, and taken me to quite a few countries, but international sportsmen, it now dawned on me, were thoroughly pampered. Sport wrapped us in an artificial circuit of cricket grounds, hotels and airports. We had to deal with performing in public, that’s true, but in return we were well paid, stayed in nice hotels and flew business class. In truth, most of these luxuries were recent introductions — for a long time England cricketers were neither well paid nor treated anything like that — but by 2002 we had little cause for complaint. Virtually all our needs were catered for. We had people to tell us when to practice, when matches started, when to attend functions and when we should speak to the press. They even did our laundry. We lived in a cosy, privileged sanctum.

The world beyond cricket, I now discovered in bachelor-hood, could not have been more different. If you didn’t do it yourself, it didn’t get done. I had little experience about the ordinary day-to-day activities that came naturally to most people. I’d gone virtually straight from living at home with my parents to living with Nicky, and I’d had next to no experience of time on my own.

They say sport builds character, but I’m not sure it does it enough. Being exposed to the big, wide world, as I was now, was a bit of a shock. I hadn’t got the grounding to get out there and survive. Doing the washing was a conundrum. Even going out to get milk and basic food was an ordeal. I can recall going shopping to my local supermarket shortly after I began my new, bachelor life. I wasn’t sure what to buy and didn’t like being there, but knew I had to do it. I hated it. It took me an age to decide what I needed.

My main concern was that someone might recognize me and know I had split from my wife. I was terrified they would have read about my circumstances. So there I was, unshaven and wearing a baseball cap, hoping no one would recognize me but afraid if they did they’d be thinking, ‘There’s that bloke in the papers … His life is fucked.’ I was riddled with guilt and paranoia.

I was definitely not a natural at looking after myself. When I began, there had been no book on how to cope with professional sport. There was no training in handling the media, let alone coping with the wider issue of being at college one day and two years later touring the world as an England cricketer. When it came to real life, I was an absolute novice.

When, the following year, in 2003, it became public what Frank Bruno had gone through, it really struck a chord. Bruno’s wife had left him and taken their three children and their divorce, along with the end of his career as a heavyweight boxer, had brought on severe mental illness. There were stories in the papers about how he’d been sleeping in a boxing ring in his garden and had delusions that he was not actually himself but someone else — Frankie Dettori, I think — and he’d ended up in a psychiatric hospital being treated for a breakdown. ‘Christ, mate,’ I thought. ‘I know exactly what sort of shitty place you’re in. I was so nearly there myself.’

If I was hoping to tidy up the mess of my life, and stabilize myself, I didn’t manage it. The trouble was, I just had no idea how to make things better.

I went through some bad times. The nights were terrible and the mornings little better. I’d typically wake in damp sweat-soaked bed-sheets, with my heart racing, and stumble downstairs wondering how I was going to get through another day feeling like this. My first port of call was often the fridge. A beer. I’d get it and wander over to the sitting room to find the remnants of the previous evening … empty bottles, overflowing ashtrays, a PlayStation. There’d been no party, just me, an evening of torture I’d grown used to. I felt like I was going mad, talking to myself. The curtains were closed, and stayed closed all day. It was scary.

I remember one midday hearing the door-bell ring and freezing. ‘Don’t move,’ I thought, ‘they’ll never know you’re here.’ Who is it? Not more journalists? The gardener (who I was paying far too much to look after my garden because I’d decided to try to sell this awful house, and who would put his bill under the door if I didn’t answer)?