Thorpe - Graham Thorpe: rising from the ashes

GRAHAM the autobiography

THORPE

RISING FROM THE ASHES

Graham Thorpe
with Simon Wilde

To my children Henry, Amelia, Kitty and Emma

I DONT THINK I m a typical professional sportsman. I wear my heart on my sleeve more than most. Im 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 thats usual in sport.

Being harsh on myself, Id 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 youre 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 youd lost, however well youd done yourself. But I stuck to the belief that if I was going to go down, it would be on my terms. I wasnt 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 elses 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 didnt enjoy it as much as I should have done. I didnt give very much as a person in those days. I was shy and uncommunicative. Ultimately it didnt 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 dont think Im a difficult person but Ill 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 didnt always see managers actually doing what they were supposed to do manage. Youd be amazed how many people in authority didnt 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, Id dreamed of finishing my England career with an Ashes Test on my home ground of the Oval who wouldnt? but, as I well know, life doesnt always work out the way youd 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 Im more careful now. When youve been hit by a juggernaut, you tend to look left and right. But Im still basically a trusting person. If you cant come to terms with whats happened to you, you can never be happy.

When I look back to how things were a few years ago after Id 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 wifes 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. Ive made mistakes in my life, but came to realize that that doesnt necessarily make you a bad person. What has happened to me in the last few years has changed me. Im more appreciative of life now and try to enjoy every day. I guess Ive mellowed a bit. Having gone through some very bad times, I feel Ive come through a better person.

I FIRST gave up cricket three years ago. I remember it was July 2002 after the Lords Test against India, but thats 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 couldnt 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 wasnt me playing in that match, it was someone else. I was in another place altogether and it wasnt 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 Id 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 Id carried on playing cricket. Id spent much of the previous winter of 200102 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 shed taken with her, because thats what I spent a lot of my life too much of my life doing. Being apart from them, playing cricket.

When I had been prepared to really think about the situation I was in, I often ended up convinced that Nicky would take me back, and that wed end up together. Quite what evidence there was for such optimism Im not sure because divorce proceedings were underway. But I clung to the hope like a life raft, which in a way it was.

During that harrowing week at Lords, supposedly the best place in the world to play cricket, the reality of my shattered world was finally sinking in. In the four months since Id come back from New Zealand I had been living alone in the family home, without Nicky and without the children, and I could not delude myself any longer.

For a long time I had viewed my life as virtually perfect: a wife and young family I loved, a comfortable five-bedroom home near Epsom in Surrey, and a successful career. Top England players had started to be paid well. Then, the regulars could earn over 200,000 a year, and nowadays that figure has risen to more than 400,000. I was admired as one of Englands best batsmen of recent years, someone who, ironically now, was considered cool in a crisis. What more could I have wanted? But I began to fear that everything my house, my family, my career was collapsing all around me. Everything was out of control and there was no way back. I was staring into an abyss, scared. I couldnt see a way out, ever. I couldnt even see beyond the next few hours or minutes. Throughout that week, I was seized by one long series of panic attacks.