Graham Thorpe - Graham Thorpe - Rising from the Ashes

On top of that I was nearly late for the start of the match. On the first morning, I had to deal with a phone call from my solicitor. He was trying to get a financial settlement with Nicky, as well as trying to work out contact arrangements for the children. The solicitors on both sides were in full flow — the parasites! I was getting letters from them every week and the bill was getting out of control. All of a sudden I was looking at my watch and thinking, ‘ Shit. It’s 9.30am. I’m supposed to be out on the ground and here I am, in the car park, on the phone.’ I was still in occasional contact with Nicky and found myself ringing her. ‘Can’t we try and work this out between us? Have you seen the size of the bills?’

I dashed through the Long Room — late, late! — and sprinted onto the ground. All the boys were looking at me. They were already involved in their warm-ups. I was like, ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry … Sorry!’ I got on with my warm-up, finished, batted for five minutes in the nets. I went into the dressing-room thinking, ‘Yeah, we’re batting. I’m into this … I’ve got to be.’ I tried to settle myself down and focus but I was struggling. Really struggling.

As I prepared for my innings that day — if ‘prepared’ is the right word — my attitude was pretty much, ‘Get out there and try your best. Things haven’t been great this morning but maybe you can drag it back. You might get a few quick runs and all of a sudden start enjoying it and carry on from there.’ It was how my mind worked at that time. There was no proper plan, no preparation. It was all a wing and a prayer.

One of the special things about Lord’s Tests, of course, is the social side. Spectators take picnic hampers, and you always know when the lunch interval is approaching because the stands start emptying as people slip off for lunch. And many aren’t in too much of a rush to get back promptly for the re-start.

Well, there must have been a few who missed my innings. I was down to bat at No 4 and not 5, where I’d been batting the previous few months, because Marcus Trescothick had been ruled out with an injury and we’d rejigged the batting order. As it happened, the second wicket fell only minutes before lunch, leaving me to negotiate a tricky little period. No time to get myself in, but plenty of time to get out. Fortunately, Anil Kumble served up a full toss first ball which even I couldn’t fail to put away to the boundary. But he beat me the following ball and, in the next over, the last before the interval, Zaheer Khan went past my bat too.

Zaheer is a lively and intelligent left-arm swing bowler, and I wasn’t surprised to see him preparing to continue when Nasser and I walked out for the afternoon session. Nasser played out the first over to put me back on strike at the Nursery End against Zaheer. Because of the slope running across the square, batting at Lord’s is all about getting used to two totally different ends. As a left-hander, I don’t mind the Pavilion End and can get into better positions there, but I have to fight not to fall over and lose my sideways position at the Nursery End, where the movement of the ball angled across you is accentuated by the drop.

Zaheer was right on target, bowling me a really good sequence of balls. He probably should have saved it for someone else, but then he didn’t know he wasn’t bowling to Graham Thorpe but his shadow. He beat me once, angled a couple into me that I had to play, before giving me one that pitched middle and leg and left me. I didn’t spot the movement, didn’t move my feet, and played down the wrong line. Then came the clatter of stumps.

I walked back to the dressing-room, unstrapped my pads and slumped into the big chair on the left of the window, opposite Freddie Flintoff, and threw down my kit. I had chosen that chair in the hope that it would bring me a change of luck. This was my tenth Test match at Lord’s, but I’d never scored a century, never got my name up on the honours board, and I’d been in the habit of moving seats in the hope it would alter my fortune. Maybe the missing hundred had something to do with the slope, but I think it was just one of those things. In the past, I’d revelled in the atmosphere and crowds at Lord’s, and certainly not everything there was against batting. The outfield was usually fast, so the ball raced away, and though I’d once been whacked over the temple by a ball from Courtney Walsh that I’d lost in the trees above the sightscreen at the Nursery End, having to spend a night in hospital, I’d returned to score 40. The last time I’d played India there, in 1996, I was confident of making a century until I got an inside edge off Javagal Srinath on 89. And now, surprise, surprise, despite the switching of chairs, my luck was still out.

I’d been smoking pretty steadily for some months by then, so I took my packet of cigarettes out of my bag and smoked two or three straight off. Mark Butcher said later that he remembered me for much of that match just sitting there in that chair, every lunch break, every tea break. All I remember thinking was, ‘Do I have to get back out there?’ Those sessions seemed like the longest and slowest I’d known.

The end of each day’s play came as huge relief, except that the relief quickly gave way to anxiety. In the back of my mind I’d be calculating that I’d got five or six hours of being awake — awake and totally miserable, before, if lucky, getting off to sleep. And sleep was hard to get. The anti-depressants hadn’t improved things, and I reckon I probably got only three or four hours of sleep a night during that match. I’d get up at 3am, feeling down, and light another cigarette. And I kept thinking, ‘I don’t want to be doing this. I can’t keep fucking doing this. This is killing me.’

I just couldn’t find any strength. I wished there was a magic switch I could flick to wipe away my entire memory-bank so I could just get back to living a normal life. But there wasn’t. If I was lucky I might drift off to sleep again for 30 minutes or an hour. Then I’d be up again thinking, ‘ Now I’ve got to go out and play again.’

If batting was bad, fielding was worse, and there was a good reason for that. Not only had my wife left me, she’d left me for someone who was also in the public eye. He was Kieron Vorster, who was Tim Henman’s fitness trainer at the time. Naturally this made the whole affair that much juicier to the papers, and there’d be no shortage of wags in the crowd with a few beers inside them ready to crack tennis jokes when I retrieved the ball from the boundary. Sure enough, the wisecracks started when we fielded, but I wasn’t strong enough to take them. ‘ Bitch …’ [that was often my first reaction] ‘… for doing this to me.’

There were many times when I just wanted to walk off. I’d go onto the field, look up at the clock and think, ‘A two-hour session. Two hours.’ Then I’d look again. One hour, 50 minutes. I just wanted the next break now, to get off. I think I stood at first slip next to Alec Stewart quite a lot of the time and prattled on about things off the field, as you do. I’d played more cricket with Stewie than perhaps anybody. He’d been on the Surrey staff when I’d joined 14 years earlier, and we’d changed next to each other in the dressing-room for most of that time. We were chalk and cheese in some respects. He was good at concealing his emotions and if something had been going wrong for him off the field, as with me now, you’d probably not have noticed. He would have been his usual professional self.

I remember finding it really difficult to encourage the bowlers; I probably did it occasionally because I felt I had to. In fact I hardly touched the ball, but I did have a chance early on to catch Sachin Tendulkar which I put down. Brilliant. ‘I’ve only gone and put down the world’s leading batsman. I don’t think I can do this again. I can’t play for England again .’ Some of the lads knew something was badly wrong, but no-one said anything.