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Reply | RiP Graham Thorpe
at 13:52 12 Aug 2024
Sensitive, warm and a wonderful team-mate: my friend Graham Thorpe
The former England cricketer, who has died aged 55, was a rock in the middle order and unquestionably the most complete batsman of our generation
Mike Atherton
, Chief Cricket Correspondent
Tuesday August 06 2024, 12.00pm, The Times
The phone call, the dreadful phone call, came on Sunday evening just as Noah Lyles crossed the finish line in Paris in a blur. And a blur is how the following day passed for those of us who counted Graham Thorpe as a valued team-mate and friend.
Normally the written word comes, if not easily then it comes eventually, but nothing came on Monday. Instead, as for many of those who played during the span of Thorpe’s first-class and international career for Surrey and England, 1988-2005, it was just a day of remembering, the good times and bad, the glory and the grind, and of connecting in a way that we don’t do nearly enough.
He was a year younger than me. We made our representative start pretty much at the same time, touring Kenya and Zimbabwe together for England A in the winter of 1989-90, a friendly gig given the senior team were in the Caribbean. I had already played two Tests when we went to Zimbabwe, but Keith Fletcher, the tour coach, had a fine eye for a young player and picked out Thorpe as the best of the young bunch. He wasn’t wrong.
Those were the days of shared rooms and we spent a lot of time together on that trip, in Harare and Bulawayo, mainly, but up country as well, with a visit to Victoria Falls. For both of us, our first senior tour, everything was fresh and new and exciting. There was a boyish enthusiasm in everything he did and while it took a long time for that to wear off, wear off it did eventually as the strain of touring and life took hold.
It took another three summers for him to be picked in Test cricket, oddly. He came in two matches before I took over as captain and after that we played 67 of his 100 Tests together. He proved himself to be unquestionably the most complete batsman of our generation, and the best between the retirement of David Gower and the arrival of Kevin Pietersen. It was the latter’s emergence, along with Ian Bell, that meant he missed the summer of 2005 and never played in an Ashes series victory.
Thorpe was neither languidly elegant like Gower, nor flamboyantly destructive like Pietersen — although he owns England’s fourth-fastest double hundred. He was compact and efficient and a tough, unflinching competitor. Two down on the first morning of a Test, you were always happy to see him walking to the middle. Difficult situations brought out the best in him and he was equally at home against pace or spin.
Allan Border, the former Australian captain — Thorpe was our equivalent rock in the middle order — had a worry mitt, a baseball glove that he would use to waylay his fears by pounding a ball into it. Thorpe was a worrier and a fiddler, too, with his kit and bat handles, in particular, but once to the middle he was calm in a crisis. He wouldn’t say much, but would look you in the eye. “Alright, skip,” he might say, “we’ve got this, haven’t we?”
He made a hundred on debut against Australia, in a series when we used 24 players. To give some idea of how things were different then, he played his first 26 Tests against either West Indies, Australia or South Africa, all three of whom had outstanding pace attacks (Australia had Shane Warne, too.) He was brave and a fine back-foot player, who could cut and pull his way out of trouble.
England didn’t tour the subcontinent much then, not at all between 1993 and 2000, but his first foray there in the winter of 2000-01 brought two of his most memorable performances. The first was a match-winning innings that finished in the dark in Karachi — England’s first win in Pakistan for 39 years; the second was a brilliant, flickering to-and-fro hundred in Colombo in sweltering heat against a doosra-loaded Muttiah Muralitharan.
By this stage, he was not the fresh-faced, innocent traveller who had enjoyed Zimbabwe in 1990. The schedule — these were pre-central contract days, when Test players did not miss county cricket — had taken its toll. Touring — ten consecutive winters with senior and A teams — had taken its toll, with the time spent away from his family.
The length and nature of tours, and the lack of back-up provided, reflected an earlier, amateur age, whereas the pace, pressure and scrutiny of them did not. This was a different time; less empathetic, less sympathetic, less open and understanding than now. The mental breakdown he suffered during the Lord’s Test of 2002 — he later wrote “there came a time when I would have given back all my Test runs and Test caps to be happy again” — was not unique to the period, though.
Thorpe represented Surrey throughout his entire career, from 1988 until his retirement in 2005
Players such as Marcus Trescothick, Jonathan Trott and Ben Stokes were to suffer mental health issues themselves later on, but by the time Stokes opened up there was better support and more understanding, after raw and revealing autobiographies such as Thorpe’s Rising from the Ashes and Trescothick’s Coming Back to Me. There had been a tendency for authorities to treat cricket and life as separate and detached. Not so much any more.
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In that context, two of his hundreds made after his enforced break were remarkable. His comeback innings, 124 at the Oval against South Africa, was, he said, the knock of a lifetime. A scratchy 28 not out on the second evening, he played sublimely the following day. Seven months later, in Bridgetown, he made 119 when no one else in the England team made more than 17.
We adored him. There is a tendency to think of cricket in the 1990s as a deeply unhappy time. It was unsuccessful, but the bonds between many of those who played remain strong. He was a wonderful team-mate, happiest with a glass of something after a (rare) victory, more popular with the public than he cared to imagine, sensitive and warm-hearted.
The last time I saw him was in Tasmania, at the end of what was a very difficult tour during Covid in 2021, which brought an end to what had been a stimulating time as the ECB’s lead batting coach. I had been running in the hills outside of Hobart and coming back into town when I spotted him on a street corner, table and chairs to hand. We sat and talked for over an hour (he could talk when the mood took him) about cricket, coaching and life.
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We hadn’t crossed paths much on tour, partly because of restrictions and partly because of the natural distance (especially when things are going badly) between those who are part of the touring party and the media. But old friendships from sport are curious things: you might not see someone for a long time, but when you do you slip back into old familiarities very quickly.
It’s something Mike Brearley said to me when I wrote about the 1981 Ashes series — Botham’s Ashes. He said: “You go through something together. It’s an arduous thing a Test match or a Test series. It can be an anxious, nervous time and if it goes well you experience great elation together. It’s the sporting equivalent of falling in love, in some ways. If I see old team-mates now, I find we start making the same jokes from 40 years ago, as if it was yesterday.”
On Saturday, two days after what was Thorpe’s 55th birthday, myself, Mark Butcher and Robert Croft — three stalwarts of the 1990s — found ourselves together at Trent Bridge, the scene of Thorpe’s debut Ashes hundred, 31 years before. Those old familiarities returned and talk turned to him. What news of the little man, we wondered? Then, a day later, the worst news of all. |
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