I never knew my granddad, the one who had introduced my mum to cricket; he died before I was born. When my sister Kate came along, our grandmother moved in and was, for the next ten years, a sort of second mother to us both. Mum, the only female lawyer in her firm, had been told by her bosses when it would be ‘convenient’ to have her second child; she loyally planned her pregnancy and was back at work two weeks after the birth. Nan was the woman who made that possible.
Nan did the school runs, cooked our meals, washed our clothes, and kept us entertained until our parents got home. She was the lynchpin of our household: a comforter, a peacemaker, a baker of deliciously buttery fairy cakes. She had a separate living room that was her private domain, somewhere the rest of us were only allowed if invited. In reality, this meant that my sister and I were in there constantly, watching the soap operas that Nan enjoyed and our parents wouldn’t otherwise let us see.
Nan wasn’t interested in cricket, but as well as Sons and Daughters and Crossroads she did like to watch snooker. Her consumption of the game was entirely passive – I never once remember her remarking on a frame, or explaining the rules to us – and she had a habit of falling asleep during matches (‘I’m just resting my eyes,’ she would murmur when we accused her of this). But the giant green rectangle in the TV screen and the suited men gliding quietly around it were a constant backdrop. Even today, I find something of the nursery in the soothing clack of snooker balls.
One of the reasons Kate and I loved Nan’s living room so much was that it offered complete amnesty from our mother’s temper. Our mother was loving, and tender, and self-sacrificing. She also staged outbursts straight out of the Basil Fawlty book of tantrums. The frustrations of having a high-pressure job and a mildly forgetful husband would build unseen until a seemingly trivial incident – a computer failing to work, or an absence of orange juice in the fridge – would trigger an explosion. There wasn’t anything violent about them – just a bit of shouting, the slamming of doors, a rare swear word hurled angrily at a piece of uncooperative technology. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, as Shakespeare would have said if he’d actually met my mum. On the other hand, their unpredictability, combined with the sheer force of Mum’s personality, made them quite terrifying.
My sister and I came to think of them as a sort of Incredible Hulk rage, because Mum seemed such a different person when they happened. At the first sign of trouble we would make for Nan’s living room. Its protected status within the house made it a safe haven, a buffer zone over which Nan presided with far greater authority than either Kofi Annan or Ban Ki-moon ever mustered. Only in special circumstances – if we had lied, or broken things, or lied about breaking things – would we be handed over for punishment. Otherwise, we were safe. Nan was our great defender.
We lost her when I was 12, and Kate was ten. Mum tended her through the terminal months of cancer; my parents had moved Nan’s bed into the living room when she became too ill to climb the stairs. Nan’s final departure was probably less painful than the months before, watching her shrink into a numb silence. I’d never thought of my mum as a nurse before, or seen her as a daughter, and I remember coming home from school once to find her asleep in the armchair next to Nan’s bed. We used to laugh at Mum and Nan for their shared habit of falling asleep in the middle of the afternoon. Now it dawned on me how tiring it was to look after other people.
After Nan’s death, our family changed. Not dramatically, but perceptibly. Routines and relationships adjusted. After a disastrous experience with a childminder who fed us nothing but Findus crispy pancakes for a month, Mum was suddenly around a bit more. Her bouts of temper, which had already waned, disappeared almost entirely. Nan’s living room became the TV room, a place where Mum could switch off from work and relax with her daughters. A place where she watched the sport she loved, and did the ironing.
In the summer of 1994, Mum and I went to our first cricket match together. Despite her great love of the sport, she had never been to a live game, because she never had anyone to go with. She came home from work one day and told me that we were going to a Test match at Lord’s. This is the cricketing equivalent of going to see your first ever gig at Glastonbury. My mum had never seemed cooler to me. In truth, I’d never considered my mum cool at all, but her ability to secure us seats to the third day of the Lord’s Test was definitely as impressive as the time she’d gone to argue a case in the high court.
I knew that Lord’s was the world headquarters of cricket, but I didn’t really know what that meant until we arrived there. Cricket had been my solitary obsession, one only my mother could understand; even the other two members of our family rolled their eyes and left the room when we started talking about it. Now I was joining a stream of people with picnic boxes, all vibrating with the same subsonic thrill as we neared the ground. As the crowd thickened at the turnstiles, people all around me were talking about the state of the game. I’d never heard so many conversations about cricket, and I wanted to listen to every one of them.
The walkways inside Lord’s were packed and difficult to navigate. Bypassing every instinct of a 15-year-old girl who wants to be taken seriously, I clung tight to Mum’s hand for fear of being separated. Sports stadia have one magical attribute in common: they make little sense until you emerge into the stands. And then pop! an impossible space bursts in front of you. ‘It’s like the Tardis!’ I whispered, awestruck. ‘It’s bigger on the inside!’ The stands were blazing white; the greensward in front of me was trimmed and primped; the pavilion looked like a painting on the lid of a tin of shortbread. The whole place seemed primed to host a royal garden party rather than a sporting contest.
My mum’s colleague, a very kind man named Robert, had secured us the tickets. England were playing South Africa and were already in a mess, seven wickets down and 200 runs behind. Being a novice at watching live cricket, I missed many of the key events. I found it hard to make out the ball, and every time a wicket fell, I was looking the wrong way or rooting around in the picnic bag for a Jaffa Cake. In the afternoon the South Africa captain, Kepler Wessels, took two hours to score 28 runs, which was every bit as boring as it sounds.
But I was at the spiritual home of cricket, and only a short if illegal sprint across the boundary rope from my real-life heroes. There was an air of celebration; it was South Africa’s first tour to England since the end of the sporting boycott, and the rainbow flag flew from their balcony. I, who had learned more about apartheid through reading up on rebel tours than I ever had in history or geography lessons, could feel my nascent social conscience swelling with pride. Nothing could spoil my day.
Then Robert, who had been listening to his pocket radio, leaned over. ‘Michael Atherton’s been caught cheating,’ he said. I assumed he was pulling my leg – he knew that Atherton was my favourite player – so I laughed at him. ‘No, really,’ he insisted. ‘They’re saying that he’s been tampering with the ball. He’s been summoned to explain himself to the match referee.’
I had learned a little about ball-tampering in the books I’d read. I knew two key things about it: it was the worst crime you could commit on a cricket field, and it was done by foreigners. The idea that Atherton, my Atherton, would flirt with such a felony was outrageous, and I told Robert so with feeling. The more details he relayed from the radio, the more stubborn I became. No, no, no. Atherton didn’t do anything. Someone had made a mistake.
The next day I discovered that that someone was me. Every newspaper carried close-ups of the moment that Atherton had taken dirt out of his pocket and rubbed it on the ball. He had told the match referee that the dirt was just to keep his hands dry of sweat, but there was no denying those screen-grabs of shame. By the evening, England had lost the game and Atherton had been fined £2,000 by England’s chairman of selectors, Ray Illingworth – not for tampering with the ball, but for tinkering with the truth.
That incident should have taught me many lessons. I should have learned that even the best men are fallible. That idols are made of breakable stuff, and that human beings cannot bear the weight of too much hero-worship. I might even have had my eyes opened to the depressing but inevitable machinations of realpolitik. But instead, I learned the power of denial. Faced with the damning evidence that my cherub-faced captain had done something wrong, I simply rejected it. The ‘dirt in the pocket affair’, as the cricket press prosaically named it, was one of the most controversial of Atherton’s captaincy, but it was the only major incident of those years that was not recorded anywhere on my walls.
The days immediately following the game were tough for both of us. He was labelled a cheat and a liar. People called for his resignation. The pressure was so great that he was forced to disappear for a few days. And I – well, I was just worried that he’d disappeared. But, like, properly worried. This was the closest my real life had ever got to a Brontë plot, and even the news that Atherton had been spotted in the Lake District couldn’t entirely reassure me. What if he’d gone there to throw himself in a lake?
The newspaper writers and the television pundits were not the only ones giving him a hard time. Taxi drivers, radio callers, and friends of mine who had shown no previous interest in cricket all cried shame – and my uncle Martyn took great delight in teasing me with his opinions of ‘the great big cheat’. But instead of causing me to doubt Atherton, Pocketgate (as absolutely no one calls it) just made me champion him more fiercely. I was, as far as I was aware, the only person in the world who wanted to take his side. And that was, to me, a prized position. To this day, I can still mount a passionate defence of Atherton’s right to carry dirt in his pockets, and to rub it on whatever he damned well pleases.
Atherton refused to resign, just as he had when England were 3–0 down in the Caribbean. His stubbornness was a trait that would come to define him, and it was one he shared with England’s new ‘supremo’, Ray Illingworth, the man now in charge of both selecting and managing the team. England were now led by a flinty Lancastrian and a mulish Yorkshireman, and their northern grit was starting to influence my own, more sensitive, soul.
The fact that I had chosen to follow what was universally considered the most boring of all sports did nothing for my social standing at school. I was generally beneath the notice of the popular crew, a clique of blonde girls who were good at netball and knew how to wear make-up. The crueller ones, who weren’t as pretty or athletic, earned their place on their wits and dispensed putdowns that could send their victims running to the bathroom in tears. Sometimes they would pick me out, narrow their eyes, and pronounce their dread judgement: ‘You’re just sad.’
It hurt, the belittling. Each time was a nagging blow landed on that tender spot where you sense you don’t belong and you likely never will. But mostly it felt unfair. The feelings I had about cricket were stronger than any I had experienced before; it was a passion that burned so fiercely I was desperate to share it. If I could just explain the game to these girls, I thought, surely they would see that they were the ones in the wrong?
So I became an evangelist, and hid my newfound joy from no one, not even my teachers. Cricket even infiltrated my GCSE assignments. I insisted on writing up a piece of coursework on the Trojan War as a sports report, and accompanied it with a picture I had doctored to show Warwickshire’s Dermot Reeve running a quick single with a horse. One of the compositions I submitted in music class was called ‘Bridgetown, 8th to 13th April 1994’. And when my English teacher asked us to write an essay entitled ‘What I Hope to Be Doing Ten Years from Now’, I confidently asserted that I would be joining England’s tour of the West Indies as a cricket correspondent and the newly-wed wife of the team captain. I’m not sure I’d thought through the conflict of interest.
The books and stationery I carried between classrooms were, inevitably, decorated with pictures of players I admired. One folder was wrapped in tartan paper in tribute to the emphatically non-Scottish Angus Fraser; another was plastered with Panini stickers of county cricketers. I still struggle to believe that Panini used to make albums for a sport as little followed as county cricket, or indeed that our newsagent carried the stickers. I was certainly the only person I knew who bought them, or who had the grinning mugshots of Ian Austin and Richard Blakey on her chemistry folder. The lever-arch that contained my English notes had just one picture on it – an A4, full-length photo of a man mid-stride, his bat held upright like a light-sabre, his head turned towards the place where an invisible ball was arcing gently over a boundary rope. ‘Cricketer of the Month: Graham Thorpe’ read the legend in the corner. It wasn’t the pose that captured him – one assumes that Thorpe had just lifted the ball leg-side with a typical flick of his wrists – so much as the expression on his face. He looked insouciant, and ever so slightly sceptical.
If you ask a cricket fan to name their favourite England batsman of the 1990s you tend to get one of two answers. You can even tell what kind of person you’re talking to by which one they pick. The romantics choose Mark Ramprakash, a man who never fulfilled his talent at international level but whose style and grace achieved, to many, a kind of perfection not seen since David Gower transferred his languid ease from his batting to his broadcasting career. The fact that Ramprakash rarely demonstrated his greatest qualities for England only seems to add to the allure.
The pragmatists, however, choose Graham Thorpe. So do I. Thorpe may not have been England’s highest-scoring batsman but he did seem its most dependable. When England’s middle order was folding like an origami deckchair, Thorpe was the one man whose appearance I always looked forward to. He strode out to the middle, brooding darkly beneath a pair of Clark Gable eyebrows, a man of action, not words. His face fell naturally into a glower. A white headband was unconsciously echoed by the sunblock that ringed his lips. No one else could have pulled off that kind of minstrel chic, but he made it look badass.
However poor the state of England’s innings (and it was generally pretty poor) Thorpe’s instinct was to counter-attack. He deserved his number-four spot in the batting order – traditionally reserved for the batsman of greatest flair – but I loved him more for his urgency than his fluency. Where his teammates were cautious or fearful, Thorpe just got on with it. There were dab-handed singles and quick-run twos, and boundaries punched through the gathering field. His pull shot, the last-second swing he took at a ball making a beeline for his body, was the one that brought me most joy. It just looked so damn brave.
And it was effective, too. In my mind, he had always made a gutsy 70 by the time he was out. I used to feel he was one of the most underestimated men in British sport; it was only when I was older that I discovered how many other cricket lovers had the same affection for him. Even sports fans who had taken only a passing interest in cricket during its decade in the doldrums would mention his name, and smile at the memory. During an era when disappointments were frequent, the prospect of a trustworthy half-century from Graham Thorpe had been a special pleasure.
And I want to tell him that. I’m not sure he can know just how much he was loved. At the end of his career, Thorpe revealed that touring had broken his marriage; that while still in the England team, he’d become depressed and had drunk too much. It had made me really sad to hear that someone who had brought me so much hope and joy had been unhappy while he was playing. I want to let him know how important he was to fans like me.
He works for the England and Wales Cricket Board these days, a batting coach to those on the fringes of the international squad. He tells me a day he’s free to meet, and it happens to be my birthday. If you had told my 14-year-old self that one day she’d enjoy a birthday tea with an England batsman who drove her in his Jaguar to a country house hotel, she’d have choked on her Ribena. And yet here we are in a sun-filled conservatory, and Graham Thorpe is drinking a cappuccino.
He is dressed exactly how you’d imagine an off-duty sportsman would be – a Ralph Lauren polo shirt, dark blue jeans, a sports jacket and wraparound sunglasses. What is surprising, however, is his conversation. Ever since he picked me up in his car, he’s been lively, positively chatty, and has smiled a lot. He doesn’t seem dour at all. The only time I see him lost for words is when a smartly liveried waitress offers us biscuits, and he asks what sort, and she replies that they are ‘in the shape of a rabbit’. And then he orders them anyway.
I start by telling him my memories of the South Africa series in 1994, beginning with the disastrous Test at Lord’s. ‘The dust in the pocket!’ Thorpe laughs. ‘I think Athers showed his naivety there. “Gardeners’ World”, he got called in the dressing-room.’ (Stewart had said something similar: ‘Typical Cambridge University bloke, highly intelligent but you’ve got no idea what you’re doing. It looked hopeless, it looked stupid, but I still to this day don’t believe he was ever trying to change the state of the ball.’ And that’s why I love Alec Stewart.)
Thorpe didn’t play in that Test, but he was picked for the next one, at Headingley. He remembers it well – it was, he says, an important match in his career. The previous winter, he had gone to the West Indies as one of Atherton’s young guns, and suffered as much as any of them under the humiliation of Ambrose and Walsh. ‘That was my first tour,’ he says, ‘and it was brutal. It was an eye-opener for me.’ During the final Test in Antigua, he and the rest of the team had fielded for three days straight as Brian Lara racked up a world record score of 375. It reminded him of what his veteran teammate Robin Smith had said to him in his first ever England game: ‘Do you like fielding, China? Because you’re going to be doing plenty of it!’
But Thorpe had made the most of the experience. He spent that tour watching Lara carefully, and when he returned to England he reworked his own technique in the nets: ‘I had Stewie [Alec Stewart] throw balls at my head for two hours.’ He also identified a key failing. ‘The English way to play the short ball was the back-foot drive, up and under – I call it “the poke”. It’s a bullshit shot. It’s what those fast bowlers wanted you to play.’
Instead, Thorpe developed a way to attack them back: the pull shot that I so admired. At Headingley, against the South African opening bowlers Allan Donald and Fanie de Villiers, he gave it its first major outing. He scored 72 in the first innings, batting alongside his captain (Atherton made 99, the ideal sympathy score after everything he’d been through), and 73 in the second. England drew the match. In the third and final Test of the series, Thorpe scored 79.
I’ve looked up Thorpe’s statistics before we meet, and he didn’t actually score as many 70s as I remembered; still, I tell him, it felt like he was often out for those midway scores: an honourable total, but not a big one. He reaches forward for a sip of cappuccino, and nods. ‘In those early days I used to get too many 50s, not enough 100s. I used to get through to the second new ball then get out.’ The tendency was exacerbated, he says, by the three-day games he used to play at county level. ‘I didn’t have that mentality that you could bat all day and bat the next day as well. You’d go and get 70 or 80 for your county side, and that was OK.’
Thorpe’s 79 is not what people will remember of that last Test against South Africa, however. I was home for the holidays, watching as Devon Malcolm faced his first ball from Fanie de Villiers. Malcolm’s batting hadn’t got any better since the winter in the Caribbean, and the head-high delivery hit him flush on his helmet. In the action replay, you could see his England badge break off and tumble poetically to the ground. The physio ran on to check him for concussion, and that interruption took longer than the rest of Malcolm’s innings, which lasted another three balls.
From our living room in Luton, I couldn’t hear Malcolm’s chilling response to South Africa’s slip cordon – ‘You guys are history’ – but I did watch the history unfold. Malcolm had a reputation for his off-days, the times when, whatever he intended, the ball did the opposite and his bowling became an enthusiastic but malfunctioning sprinkler system, spurting erratically in all directions. This, however, was not one of those days. The very first ball he bowled rose up at Gary Kirsten’s throat, a faster, meaner version of the delivery that had clocked him ten minutes previously. The next ball did the same. The third reached only Kirsten’s waist, but the batsman was so spooked by the first two that he turned away, and the ball ricocheted off his glove. Malcolm hurled himself down the pitch and caught it in his follow-through.
Kirsten’s half-brother Peter tried to survive Malcolm’s bowling by hooking at it – he was caught on the boundary. When Malcolm despatched Hansie Cronje too, South Africa were 1 for 3, and I was hyperventilating. Such a scoreline couldn’t be possible: even at England’s worst, in Trinidad, we hadn’t lost three wickets for one run. My mum came back from her Saturday shop, and I breathlessly filled her in. She took up residence beside me on the sofa. The minute she went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, Malcolm struck again.
In fact, my mum missed every one of Malcolm’s wickets. After she’d resumed her seat the phone rang in the hall, and the next player was out while she hurried to answer it. Some trifling matter required her presence in another room; the next wicket fell. She soon became convinced that she held South Africa’s fate in her hands, and sat out the rest of the innings in the kitchen. My mum missed one of the greatest individual bowling spells of all time in order to keep it happening, and I think Devon Malcolm’s match-winning figures of 9 for 57 should carry a footnote in her honour.
Thanks to Malcolm’s contribution an important series was drawn, and Atherton’s dirty pockets were forgiven, if not forgotten. England had shown improvement and Ray Illingworth’s appointment looked like a good idea. As Atherton prepared to lead them to Australia to attempt to regain the Ashes, for the first time in forever you could believe they stood a chance.
In the bright conservatory, I admit to Thorpe that he is not what I expected. ‘I always read that you were . . .’
‘Surly?’
‘Shy. Or poker-faced. Or dour.’
He nods. ‘I think on the field of play I was,’ he says. ‘I never used to take my helmet off, even when I was walking back to the pavilion. “The Man with No Name.” That’s how I used to view myself. I was quite happy with that.’
And it worked for him. He played his first Test against Australia, under Gooch’s captaincy, when the England dressing-room was an intimidating place for a 23-year-old: ‘Gooch seemed such a huge bloke. I was in awe of him.’ Meanwhile the opposing captain, Allan Border, had confronted the young batsman as he took the crease and told Thorpe in uncomplimentary terms that he didn’t expect him to last long. The first three days of that match had gone badly for England and, according to a peculiar tradition of the time, there was a rest day halfway through. ‘I went down to London [from Trent Bridge], had a barbecue and a few beers. I realised that you needed to embrace the harshness of that environment, and not be afraid to mess up. You think, “If I’m going to go down, I’m going to at least go down on my own terms.”’
The next day, Thorpe scored a century, only the fourteenth Englishman to do so on debut, and Allan Border himself shook his hand. ‘So from very early on I understood that’s how the game was. There wasn’t anywhere to hide. I’d played rough football when I was younger, in a dirty football league, where people used to try to break each other’s legs. And that was far worse than a Test match arena. Once you’ve realised that you start to enjoy playing for England. You realise you can survive in this dog-eat-dog world.’
He might as well have said the last sentence with a cheroot hanging from his lips. No wonder I used to think Thorpe was the coolest of the England cricketers: he refused to be cowed by the opposition, whoever they were. It was a trait he shared with Atherton, and, at the end of Atherton’s 54 Tests as captain, Thorpe had played in 48 of them, more than any other player. Maybe that’s another reason I liked him so much – Atherton had given him the ultimate stamp of approval.
Thorpe hadn’t, he tells me, warmed to his new captain instantly. ‘He was a totally different background,’ he says, then pauses. ‘Well, he seemed a totally different background. He’d been to Cambridge University; mine was a state school education. I could have been a little bit chippy in my early days – not really founded on anything but my own insecurities, to be honest. He might have been guarded around me, too. That’s Athers’ nature in many ways – don’t dive in or reveal too much about yourself. But I had an evening out with him in the West Indies when we got drunk together and I got to know him a bit more. A rum and Coke generally loosens things up.’
And just like Atherton, he loved the fight most when the chips were down. The chips were often down. In an ideal situation, a number four comes in to bat when the top three have seen off the new ball and put some runs on the board – a score of 100 or so provides a safe launch pad for a number four’s more expansive style of play. When England went to Australia in the winter of 1994–95, Thorpe played ten Test innings. Only twice did he come in to bat with the score over 60, which must have been frustrating? He shakes his head. ‘I generally thrive on a bit of a crisis so I used to love that. At 11.30 a.m. we’re 30 for 3 and everyone’s jeering at you . . . by lunchtime you’re walking off and you’re 120 for 3 and they’re a bit quieter. That became my role. I was better in that situation than I ever was going in at 300 for 3.
‘Even if the team were in a mess there was the enjoyment of going out and doing well, still doing your bit, looking around and thinking, “You’re playing Test match cricket, you’re learning, and you’re going to make it as difficult as it can be for the opposition.” I can still remember those feelings.’
I can remember the feelings, too. With its nine-hour time difference, an Ashes tour is the most difficult of propositions for the cricket fan, especially one who has school the next morning, and has just started studying for her A levels. I was still in the habit of taking the radio to bed with me, but to follow the Ashes required a harsh regime. I would listen as long as I could stay awake, which was usually midnight, then set an alarm clock to wake me up midway through the afternoon and evening sessions, at 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. respectively. If England were having a decent spell, it was my duty to listen on as long as it lasted.
This was rarely very long, however. The hope that had built through the summer quickly burst, and England’s batting proved just as collapsible as the winter before. They even managed to get beaten by the 19-year-olds in Australia’s academy side. In between games, there were constant bulletins of new and inventive injuries to England players: bad backs, broken fingers, torn muscles. Two of the bowlers managed to catch chickenpox. I was studying Hamlet in my English lessons, and I remember distinctly reading a scene in which Gertrude told Laertes, ‘One woe doth tread upon another’s heel, So fast they follow.’ ‘Gertie,’ I thought, ‘I know exactly what you mean.’
I could glean a little private joy from the fact that Atherton repeatedly top-scored for England, but even that was limited: one of those high scores was 25. Australia had retained the Ashes by the end of the third Test. England gave them a fight, at least, in Sydney. My walls had long run out of space for more posters, so after that match it was my ceiling that was adorned with pictures of Darren Gough, the sunny young Yorkshireman who hit a hearty half-century, then scuttled the Australians for 116.
His irrepressible confidence inspired England afresh. They actually won the following Test in Adelaide, thanks in no little part to Thorpe, who rescued a teetering second innings with a swashbuckling 83. I looked hungrily at the pictures of the England players celebrating on their balcony, and emptying an ice bucket on their captain’s head. It seemed like an important moment, and I’d been asleep when it happened.
But that victory, like the one in Barbados before it, was an early example of the mirage effect that attended England over the next few years. A solitary victory against major opposition, often achieved after the main prize was already lost, would convince me and other gullible fools that England truly were capable of beating anyone, at any time. The occasional, random wins raised my hopes beyond what was remotely reasonable or likely; their mere existence was enough to convince me that our team was on some sort of upward trajectory, however slight. I should have become inured to defeat, but those false glimmers kept the disappointment fresh. After Adelaide, England capitulated again. Thorpe scored 123 in the first innings – he had come to the crease with England 5 for 2 and made nearly half their entire total of runs – but he was out for 0 in the second innings, when only three England players made it out of single figures.
By this stage the regular interruptions to my sleep had become impossible to conceal from my parents. I was a kid who rarely stayed up later than Have I Got News For You. Now I was emerging from my room each morning with the drawn look of someone who had discovered a far more serious vice than Mars Bar ice creams. I had neither the energy nor the wish to speak before leaving the house. I was exhausted to the point of mental disintegration. When Darren Gough, the one bright star of the tour, succumbed to injury in the one-day games that followed the Tests, it’s possible I suffered some sort of episode – I’m not sure how else to account for the number of pictures I collected of Gough being carried off the field/sitting with his leg on ice/flying home on crutches.
That was the last tour where England kept up their tradition of a fancy dress dinner at Christmas time. There’s a photograph of them all: Darren Gough in the most star-spangled of Uncle Sam outfits; Mike Gatting convincing as Henry VIII; Ray Illingworth as a Chinese emperor. Other costume choices seem less obvious: Phil DeFreitas, for instance, is looking off to one side, apparently unsure why he chose the skintight Lycra Batman costume. Atherton, perhaps secretly hankering for a more cavalier style, is Robin Hood. At the back stands a Roman centurion. He’s smiling more than you imagine a grim-faced warrior would do, but it’s nice to see Graham Thorpe enjoying himself.
That image fitted with the cartoon sketch I had of Thorpe, of his reliability, his battling spirit, his role as a silent but willing protector. The longer Thorpe played, the more essential this presence seemed, and I couldn’t fathom Atherton’s team without him. But twice, in his later years, he withdrew from England duties because of personal troubles. He wrote in his autobiography that matters away from the pitch – including the break-up of his marriage, but also the deaths of cricketing colleagues Graham Kersey and Ben Hollioake, both killed in car crashes – had caused him great turmoil. At the time, a player choosing not to represent their country made no sense to me at all. It never occurred to me that Thorpe might have more worries than the two-dimensional variety my head could handle.
I’m telling him about Alec Stewart’s memories of the nineties, and how he looks back on the games he played with a surprising detachment, almost as if someone else was playing those games. I wonder aloud if it is some sort of protective mechanism. ‘I think that’s a good way of putting it,’ says Thorpe. ‘Alec was very good at compartmentalising. Things off the field Alec could deal with really well. Whereas with me . . . I think it’s pretty obvious, once something was going on behind the scenes I found it very difficult to stay focused on the job in hand. Al could probably think, “Just another game of cricket.” Whereas I was thinking, “What are we doing on this pitch, really?” For periods, cricket just seemed entirely irrelevant.’
As it turned out, Thorpe’s England career outlasted that of any of his nineties colleagues. He played his last Test in 2005, just a couple of months before England finally regained the Ashes. By that stage, England were, in his words, ‘a tough team to beat’. I agree but I feel I’ve got to ask, why were they so easy to beat before? ‘I’d put a certain amount down to never getting the same bowlers on the park,’ Thorpe says. He quickly reels off a list of a dozen bowlers who opened the bowling in the mid-nineties ‘. . . and I’m not even putting a great deal of thought into it. For me, that was a big reason.’
Later, I’ll look up the number of pace bowlers who played in the first 15 months of Atherton’s captaincy: 14 bowlers, in 14 Tests. England couldn’t seem to find a regular group of players to work in partnership. There were myriad injuries, and sometimes bowlers just didn’t perform well enough to justify their place. Thorpe thinks he knows why: their contracts. The county sides they played for week-on-week were the ones who paid their salaries. Playing for England was a reward for doing well, but it had to be fitted around the day job. ‘You finished a county game, you drove up, one day’s practice, straight into the game,’ says Thorpe. ‘Everything was in a rush. You’d finish a Test match and go and play for your county the next day. There wasn’t always a game, but more often than not there was, and you would pack up your bags and go straight on – which was unhealthy. You couldn’t reflect over a few beers with your team – what did we do well? or why weren’t we successful? – and going back and playing for your county would take energy from the bowlers. In a Test match, we could have a side 100 for 5, but then our third spells would tire off.’ I remember it well, I say. The opposition would rally, and a promising situation would disappear.
Tufnell had brought up the same issue. ‘I used to have to try to get Angus Fraser out of bed every morning,’ he remembered, and performed a little skit of Fraser – as a zombie with rigor mortis – attempting to get to the bath. ‘We’d be playing on a Monday for Middlesex, we’d bowl 40 overs, get in a car, drive up to Old Trafford, lose the toss and be bowling against Australia on Thursday. We’d be absolutely shagged out.’
Many players were advocates of ‘central contracts’, which would see them reporting directly to the England team, and would require their welfare to be put above the county’s pound of flesh. Thorpe remembers a senior cricket official once telling him that they would only consider central contracts when England started winning some matches. ‘I said, “How are we going to win Test matches when we don’t get the same bowling attack on the pitch, because they’re bloody injured every other week?” The Australian bowling attack hadn’t changed for three series, because they got looked after properly.’
When I was lambasting their uselessness from my sofa, I didn’t consider that players might just be tired. In fact, when a player did badly for England, people would say that what they needed was to get back to their county and get some more runs/overs/wickets under their belt. I tended to nod along at this sentiment, because it didn’t occur to me that the county schedule might be what was wearing them out. Still, I shouldn’t beat myself up about it. Apparently it didn’t occur to the people who ran cricket either.
It’s getting on, and Thorpe will soon be heading home to his two young daughters. I don’t want to embarrass him, but I can’t leave without telling him what I came here to say. ‘You’re remembered fondly,’ I start. ‘Among lots of my friends. Well, not my friends, but people I’ve met. You’re their favourite batsman. At least 50 per cent of them.’ I realise this sounds like a low figure. ‘No, more. Maybe, like, 80 per cent.’ Embarrassing Thorpe was never the issue; I was always 100 per cent more likely to embarrass myself. I stumble on. ‘I just wondered, well, hoped, really, because we have this perception that perhaps you didn’t realise . . . how popular you were. You were very well loved. Did you know that? Did you even know how good you were?’
I can feel my ears turning red, but Thorpe is unruffled. He answers my last question first. ‘I felt I was learning on the job,’ he says. ‘My first 35 Tests were a barrage, so you’re constantly just standing up for yourself. You’re fighting all the way through it. It wasn’t until towards the end of my career that I felt I’d worked the game out, and I knew when I’d done well.’ He smiles. ‘But it’s wonderful when you finish and you meet people and they talk fondly about you. It’s really nice to hear.’
He drives me back to the train station, and we chat about his little girls. They have some hobbies – playing piano, riding bikes – but he’s worried they don’t seem very serious about anything yet. ‘Just wait until they’re teenagers,’ I want to say. ‘You’ll be begging them not to take everything so seriously.’ But I don’t, because he’s probably seen far enough into the scary mind of an adolescent girl for one day.