Graham Thorpe - Graham Thorpe - Rising from the Ashes

GRAHAMthe autobiography

THORPE

RISING FROM THE ASHES

Graham Thorpe

with Simon Wilde

To my children Henry, Amelia, Kitty and Emma

Cover

Title Page GRAHAM the autobiography THORPE RISING FROM THE ASHES Graham Thorpe with Simon Wilde

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

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.

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.