Kitabı oku: «Graham Thorpe: Rising from the Ashes»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

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

ONE Incredible Journey

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.

TWO Sleepwalking

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.

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 wasn’t me playing in that match, it was someone else. I was in another place altogether and it wasn’t 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 I’d 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 I’d carried on playing cricket. I’d spent much of the previous winter of 2001–02 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 she’d taken with her, because that’s 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 we’d end up together. Quite what evidence there was for such optimism I’m 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 Lord’s, 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 I’d 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 England’s 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 couldn’t see a way out, ever. I couldn’t even see beyond the next few hours or minutes. Throughout that week, I was seized by one long series of panic attacks.

As it happened, I’d not played for about a fortnight before that Test against India and had spent a lot of time at home in the lead-up to the game. I might have played in Surrey’s championship match at Canterbury but they’d not needed me. They had a strong squad — they were leading the table and had been for most of the season — and trying to fit in the contracted England players on the few occasions we were available wasn’t easy. I had come to dread the time at home because it meant time alone and time on my hands; time to think about all that had gone wrong. I’d pretty much abandoned training by this stage. I was drinking and smoking every day and had been for several months; that was far more my idea of the way to get through a day. Not the ideal preparation for a Test match.

I found it hard to cope, and about a week before the match finally got up the courage to visit my doctor and ask for help. It wasn’t an easy thing to do but I was getting desperate. I’d actually been thinking about it for months. My parents, who knew I was in a pretty bad state, had suggested I go for counselling but I didn’t see the point. My attitude was that there was only one person who could help sort out my situation, and that was Nicky.

I’d never met the doctor before but I think he knew who I was, which only added to my embarrassment. My problems had been splashed all over the newspapers during the last few months, and made my situation even harder to bear. I explained everything and every symptom, that I was waking at 3 am most mornings, my mind buzzing. I was unable to get back to sleep. I was down about everything. Depressed.

He listened to what I had to say and said, ‘Look, I think you’re clinically depressed. Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to try to stabilize.’ So he put me on anti-depressants. My parents were against them and warned me not to get hooked. I’d tried other things to get me through the solitary nights, and thought anti-depressants couldn’t make me feel any worse. But they didn’t make me feel better straightaway. I know I probably should have continued to take them for a bit longer, that they might have helped, but I was scared off them by what happened next. When you start taking them you hallucinate. And I was taking them during the Lord’s Test against India.

I wasn’t thinking rationally. I was trying to get through each day as best I could. I was gambling with my future — though, frankly, the future was the last thing on my mind.

Sportsmen, especially, need to respect their bodies, and unsurprisingly I eventually felt the toll of filling my system with alcohol. Had anyone been able to observe me at really close quarters during this period, they would not have been impressed with me. I wasn’t impressed with myself. What I did was not good for me, except that it helped me escape my situation. I was depressed and desperate.

I kept playing cricket because I felt it would help me keep a grip on things. What else was I supposed to do? But I could feel this grip on things becoming more tenuous by the day. I didn’t know how long I could keep going, pretending I was okay. And at Lord’s, it all started to unravel.

All of a sudden, I felt extremely vulnerable. I became acutely aware that I was on a big stage and, for the first time in my life, I didn’t want to be there. I wasn’t just terrified that my marriage might be over, but that I was the last person to have worked this out. I was overwhelmed by public humiliation. I looked round the dressing-room and saw other people who were really quite enjoying themselves. I tried hard to enjoy it for them, almost forcing myself to be up for the game, but it was hopeless. ‘Could someone please, please, help me. I can’t do it any more. I just want to go away and hide forever.’

THAT GAME was the slowest torture. I reckon barely a minute went by without me thinking about my children. I tried to fight against it, but even catching a glimpse of children in the crowd was enough to trigger me off. I should never have played. I went through those five days with tears near to the surface with almost everything I did. I was constantly seconds away from breaking down. You can’t just walk off the field when you’re playing for your club or county, let alone England, but that’s what I wanted to do. Hide. But I knew I had to carry on. I knew how vulnerable I was but I also knew that tens of thousands of people, at the ground and on TV, were watching me. Sometimes you just have to put on a face, even though you’re feeling awful and your self-esteem is on the floor. Inside I was looking at my life and thinking, ‘I can’t go on any more.’

I remember a night or so before the game going with Dominic Cork and John Crawley to a pub around the corner from where we were staying in Swiss Cottage. Corky had been through divorce himself, and told me it was a process you eventually came out of. When you’re the one forced out, you fight against it. What I mainly remember about that evening is me yakking on, going on and on about my divorce. The children, the emotional cost and the friction, the money … you start to hate yourself, going on like a broken record, constantly explaining why, why, why.

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.

On the second night of the game I reckon I got off to sleep about midnight, maybe lam, and was up again by about 3 or 4am, having woken sweating like a proverbial pig. I often did around then. The drinking was making me a bag of nerves. Maybe three or four beers or a bottle of wine and I’d wake up in the night, sober, in a cold sweat, my mind jumping. And I wasn’t looking forward to the cricket at all. I told myself to try and find something positive to latch onto but there was nothing, just that clock ticking round, the lunch and tea breaks and the moment I could get off the pitch. I must have been tired by then. Really, really tired.

On the third day, the Saturday, a solicitor and barrister came to see me. It was a completely surreal experience. Here I was playing a Test match for England at the greatest venue in the world, being interrogated in a lunch break about my finances. It was perhaps an indication of my state of mind at the time. I should never have let it happen, and it showed how easily manipulated I was at that time. I was so racked with guilt over my marriage break-up that I was always trying to accommodate people, and show what a decent bloke I could be.

We went through my whole financial situation, how much a settlement was likely to cost, how much Nicky was likely to get, and in the back of my mind I’m thinking, ‘You’re discussing my future earnings, discussing my next year’s salary and what maintenance I’m going to pay, and I’m not even sure I’ll be earning a penny then’ I had an England contract but they were renewed — or not — each September, and I wasn’t certain I was going to be in England’s thinking in one week’s time, let alone two months.

After tea, I batted again. We were already well ahead and preparing to set India a big target. We were 60-odd for two when I joined Michael Vaughan, who was already playing well and on course for a century — he was then in the early stages of a golden run that lasted for the next 12 months. It was after tea, and there was still a while to go until stumps. Even if I’d been in a great state of mind it was the kind of situation I’d have found awkward. I was rarely great when the match didn’t demand much of me. I preferred it when we had our backs to the wall — but now that only applied to my private life.

I remember walking out to bat and looking around the field, supposedly to take in where the fielders were positioned, but knowing full well that I wasn’t going to do a thing. I had absolutely zero game-plan. A couple of balls came down from Kumble and I just swung my arms, feet planted at the crease. Somehow, in the next over from Ajit Agarkar, I squirted one out on the leg side for a single. That got me back down to Kumble’s end. I remember registering that he’d decided to go round the wicket to bowl into the rough, but I thought, ‘I don’t really care.’ I blocked one, then left one, before having another wild swing. The ball leapt out of the rough, hit high on the bat and my drive went uppish to a fielder in the covers.

My over-riding feeling as I trudged off was huge sadness that I could have played in such a state of mind, but there was anger too, anger that Nicky, I suspected, would have been happy to see me go through this torment. She had spoken of getting her revenge — and if that’s what she wanted it must have been sweet. I kind of made up my mind there and then to pack it in, walking off the field and trudging through the Long Room to an embarrassed silence.

It would have been almost completely silent in the dressing-room, too. It’s usual for someone to say, ‘Bad luck, mate’, but that was one thing I always hated because often it wasn’t bad luck and, even if it was, I didn’t want to hear it. So I’m pretty sure it was quiet. I felt a sense of relief as I sank back into my chair thinking, ‘This is definitely the last time. I can’t go through that again.’

WE WON the Test with quite a bit to spare, late on the final day. I remember taking the winning catch: I have this picture in my head of holding the catch off Simon Jones low down at gully, throwing it up and seeing the boys running together. I simply turned and walked off.

Nasser knew one of his players hadn’t really been at the races. I’d spoken to him during the game, out the back of the dressing-room where there’s a TV, and told him I didn’t think I could do this much longer. That was shortly after I’d had that session with the barrister. Like Duncan Fletcher, the coach, Nasser knew very well I’d been having severe marital problems for several months.

I told him I couldn’t get my mind into any decent place to play cricket. Playing for England, you’re meant to have your whole heart and mind in it. I said that I didn’t feel I was giving him anything, wasn’t giving the team anything and that, to be honest, he’d have to get rid of me in a game or so anyway if I carried on the way I was. It really was best if I went away and tried to sort myself out. He reminded me that two games ago I’d got a hundred. ‘Yeah, and do you know how I managed it? Because I’m not sure I do.’

Alec Stewart and Mark Butcher, my Surrey muckers, were very good at the end of the game. They stayed around. Butch had gone through a separation of his own a couple of years earlier and said I reminded him of himself then, playing cricket but not really wanting to be there. Butch said he admired me and that I would eventually come through, stronger. I felt on a good level with Butch. We both understood that although there was a game going on out in the middle, occasionally things off the field had to take priority. They were kind words of encouragement, even if I found them hard to believe at the time.

I hadn’t really said anything to Duncan during the game, but could tell the wily old fox had been keeping an eye on me. Duncan had been England coach for three years, and I had learned that I could speak honestly with him. His public image was dour but there was a lot more to him than the public saw. He was always sensitive to how his players were getting along as people. I knew he cared about us and I trusted him. He’d had his own difficulties in life, growing up in Zimbabwe and taking the big step of leaving for South Africa in his mid-thirties with little money in his pocket and few firm plans in his head.

Soon after the finish, I called him onto the balcony. ‘Are you all right?’ he said. ‘No. I don’t think I can do this any more,’ I replied. ‘I don’t want to carry on the way I’ve been during this game. I really need to get away from cricket and have a break. I’m not giving you anything. To be honest, I’m totally fucked up at the moment.’

‘I can tell your mind’s not on the job …’ He was trying to cajole me. ‘But what are you going to do? I’m concerned about you as a human being. All right, there’s the cricket side, but I’m more concerned about you. You come away from the cricket now and what are you going to do? Sit at home and your problems are going to multiply by 10.’

‘I just can’t go on the way my mind is,’ I explained. ‘I’m not freezing out there, but I am becoming a wreck. I think I’m losing control of my mind.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘But, you know, you’ve got to do something.’

A few minutes later, I spoke to Keith Medlycott, the coach at Surrey, and Richard Thompson, the club chairman, and asked them to support me because I had to withdraw from all cricket.

And so there I was, left to pack my bags.

As I walked through the Long Room, I looked around for one last time. ‘This is it,’ I thought. ‘I’m never going to play at Lord’s again.’ If you’d told me that I would not only play more Test matches at Lord’s, but the next time I’d help Nasser knock off the runs for victory, I simply wouldn’t have believed you.

Honestly, my over-riding feeling then was of utter relief. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I knew I couldn’t go through another match like that again.

THREE Clinging to the Cliff-Face

I HAD BEEN battling to keep a grip on my mind ever since Nicky had dropped the bombshell the previous summer, in late August 2001, that she wanted to separate. The traumatic weeks that followed were the start of my spiral into the depression that gripped me during that awful match the following summer at Lord’s.

A few days after she’d announced this, I was due to have a meeting with Steve Bull, the England team’s psychologist, ahead of England’s one-day series in Zimbabwe in September 2001. It was a routine meeting: recently, before every season and tour we had individual meetings with Steve to discuss our goals, personally and for the team. The Test matches that followed in India and New Zealand were the serious part of the schedule, and the original plan was for me to rest from what was a low-key tour of Zimbabwe (the controversies surrounding tours of that country came later), but I’d been called up when Craig White reported unfit. Steve had been with the team a few years and I’d used him a lot in 1999 when I’d had difficulties with the management (I was unhappy at their refusal to allow me paternity leave, among other things, and they thought I was sometimes a bad influence) and he’d helped me try to channel my anger in the right direction. I was meeting Steve at the David Lloyd Centre in Wimbledon, and must have been pretty keen because I sat in the car park for about an hour waiting for him to arrive.

When we sat down, Steve started pulling some sheets out of his case. I got a glimpse of one headed, ‘England’s Mentally Strongest Cricketers’, and saw that somehow I’d sneaked into the Top 10. I thought, ‘Really? I feel as weak as shit at the moment.’ Then he asked me to do some tests but I just butted in and said, ‘Steve. I think it’s best if I stopped you right there …’ And I explained to him what’d happened. We ended up spending about an hour together talking it over.

I told him I was ready to go to Zimbabwe and to try and get on with things, but he warned me I’d have to train my mind to be active and to stop dwelling on my problems with Nicky. But that was far easier said than done. You can train your body but it’s very hard to train your mind, and there were times after that when I would just say to him, ‘Steve, I don’t know how I’m going to cope with this. I’m trying to train my mind, but I can’t.’

I left for that tour in a state of shock. I hadn’t really comprehended what was going on with Nicky. I suspected the worst but clung to the hope that things were not as bad as they seemed, and that though she’d spoken about a trial separation she would quickly lose interest in the whole thing and we’d get back together. Maybe it was just a phase she needed to go through.

I’d no idea that there might be someone else involved, but my phone-calls home from Zimbabwe only confirmed the impression that she wanted to go off and do something else with her life. Rather than face up to the fact, I increasingly sought comfort in a haze of drinking and smoking as I tried to dull the pain. So much for training my mind.

I wondered how long I’d be able to hide things from my team-mates, and the unsurprising answer was not long. It’s hard to be up when you’re down, and it didn’t help that every morning on the team bus we’d listen to that wrist-slitting REM song ‘Every Day Hurts’. I managed for three or four days before Nasser got to me one morning and said, ‘What the hell’s up with you? You’ve hardly said a word all tour.’

‘No, nothing,’ I lied. ‘I’m all right.’ But I told him soon enough about how Nicky had asked for a separation a few weeks previously. Nasser and I had known each other a long time. We had first come across each other in county schools matches, and since then had played a lot of cricket together for England for almost 10 years. Our views on a lot of things were similar. We’d spoken about the strain professional cricket puts on relationships, and agreed we didn’t want to play just for our marriages to go down the drain, so I knew he was someone who’d understand better than most. When he asked me what I thought about the whole thing, I told him I honestly didn’t know. I admitted I was wondering whether I should go back home or not. In the end I stayed but sat out a couple of matches, and in the ones I did play in I was terrible.

Once my situation became general knowledge among the squad, Ben Hollioake, one of my closest friends in the Surrey team, was a big help. He regularly came knocking on my door to check I was all right in the evenings, and would persuade me to go out and eat with him. He was always trying to distract me and was so understanding, amazing for someone who was only 21. I think he was pretty shocked. He’d viewed Nicky and I as a stable couple.

In normal circumstances, given that I’d got a young family, I would probably have been one of the guys who’d have questioned whether I should have gone on the Test tour of India about a month later, because there were security fears following the September 11 terrorist attacks. If we’d been happy together I’m sure Nicky would have told me I shouldn’t go, but not now. It was, ‘Go on, you’ve got to get on that plane.’

THE WARM-UP GAMES in India were a real struggle. I played in the first one in Hyderabad but scored few runs and sat out the second in Jaipur, even though I could have done with the practice. The original plan was for me to play but I pulled out. I was so depressed that I struggled to get out of bed and phoned Dean Conway, our physiotherapist, to tell him I wasn’t sleeping and couldn’t play. This was one of the hardest periods I went through. I wanted to go onto antidepressants but Dean wouldn’t let me, and told me to cheer myself up by getting into the gym. I managed it once but came away utterly exhausted and defeated.

The time difference was awful, my sleep pattern was awful and my fitness was awful, and all that in a country where the heat was stifling. I was on Sudafed to keep me awake during the day, and on sleeping tablets to drive away the demons at night. Two sleeping tablets occasionally got me through from midnight to 6am, but often I woke much earlier. Nicky wouldn’t speak to me until the children were in bed, and that was 3am in India. Sometimes that’d be when I was waking. I often spoke to her for about an hour. I was still trying to get her back. She just wouldn’t give ground but I thought I could persuade her. I would often end up in tears, begging, pleading.

My routine, such as it was, was to try and practice — and stay awake — during the day, and in the evening spend a couple of hours with Ashley Giles and Michael Vaughan on the PlayStation. For me, this was the best part of the day, a couple of mates around me with whom I could try to have a laugh. The worst part was being alone in my room at night, and I began to have a bottle of Scotch to hand. Normally, I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing such a thing, especially in such a humid country. I might have had one or two glasses of wine during the evening but this was madness, drinking and smoking — I’d taken up smoking as well — and generally making myself unhealthy.

By the time of the first Test in Mohali, I was incapable of concentrating properly. We batted first and I found myself facing a swing bowler called Iqbal Siddiqui playing his first Test. He kept drifting the ball away from me. I hadn’t prepared for this type of bowling and, after driving him through the covers a couple of times, was caught off a lazy front-foot drive. Later, as India amassed a big lead, I remember standing in the field, fortunately with sunglasses on, tears in my eyes, wondering what was happening to my life. I also dropped an absolute sitter off Richard Dawson, our spinner. The batter literally lobbed it up to me. Everyone just stood there, looking at me. ‘Shit, shit, shit, shit, SHIT!’

Somehow I batted for about three hours in our second innings, ninth out for a top score of 62, but it was a surreal experience. For the first time I could remember, I was batting for my country and didn’t really care what happened. I knew we were almost certainly going to lose because we’d conceded a huge first innings deficit and India’s spinners, Anil Kumble and Harbhajan Singh, were in their element. As they ran in to bowl to me, I kept thinking about my private life, Nicky and the children, and how long I could cope. I thought ‘Whoops, there’s a Kumble googly. Whoa! … Harbhajan’s other one.’ Sometimes I’d put a straight bat on one and think, ‘How the hell did I do that?’ I wasn’t thinking about footmarks or how much the ball was turning, I was thinking ‘My life’s a mess.’ I was playing from memory.

I had the wicket-keeper chuntering away, and at one stage turned round to him and said, ‘Why don’t you cut it out? I don’t give a shit. I’m probably going to get out any moment. What you say isn’t going to make any difference.’

If anyone had known what was going through my brain they would have packed me off to The Priory, no questions asked. In the end, I chipped a return catch to Kumble and we lost with a day to spare.

TWO NIGHTS before the second Test in Ahmedabad, during another seriously bad phone call to Nicky, I finally realized that she might be in a relationship with Kieron. Perhaps somewhere at the back of my mind I had suspected as much, but if I ever thought about it at all I probably dismissed the idea as ridiculous. A couple of mates of mine had suggested she must be involved with someone else — you don’t just suddenly want to separate for no reason — but I’d just waved it away. The realization that she might be seeing someone, and someone I had once called a friend — because Nicky and I used to socialize with Kieron and his former girlfriend, Laura — sent me into a hurt rage. How could Nicky behave like this in the house we’d bought together only a few months earlier, while I was halfway round the world trying to support her and the children?

I decided I had to go home and try, however hopeless it seemed, to sort things out. I spoke to Nasser and Duncan the night before the game, and neither tried to dissuade me. I think they knew my mind was made up, and that I wasn’t in the habit of being talked out of things.

My decision to abandon the tour failed to achieve anything, and merely succeeded in splashing my problems all over the newspapers. I was met by a television journalist at the airport asking me whether my marriage was on the rocks, and when I got back to my house there were half a dozen reporters camped on the doorstep. The tabloids felt sure there was substance to the rumours now circulating about my marriage because I was returning home early. That morning The Sun had printed a photograph of another man — unnamed in the newspaper but it was Kieron — going into my house with Nicky. How juicy.

I didn’t believe Nicky’s and Kieron’s claims that nothing was going on between them, but told the reporters that Kieron was a family friend to get the reporters off my case. Nicky and I ‘gutsed’ it out living in the same house, arguing in front of the children, Nicky saying she wanted to separate but unsure if she wanted a divorce, me wanting … what did I want? Just to wake up from all this.

Things got worse. About a week after I got back, a girl from Cheshire called Lizette Roberts, who was trying to launch her pop career, claimed in the News of the World that she’d met me after a one-day international in Manchester five years earlier and had had sex with me six times in a night. Of course it wasn’t true, but it made things between Nicky and me all the harder, especially as I’d previously admitted to Nicky my one infidelity in New Zealand back in 1997. I did take advice about suing this woman but was warned against it — something about it being my word against hers.

Everything was out of control. I was someone who’d always wanted my private life to be private; now I was probably the most public cricketer in the land. I was in territory I knew nothing about. I didn’t even want a divorce, let alone to answer nasty questions — and they were pretty nasty — from reporters. It would’ve been hard enough to cope with all this in private, as any break-up is, but the constant sniping questions from reporters made it awful.

In the end, I moved out of the house and went to stay with Alistair Brown, who lived nearby. I’d known Ally since we were 13. He was then a confident lad who bowled big leg-breaks and had a talent for hitting the ball out of the park, testimony to some of the quickest hands and eyes in the game. Although slightly suspect against the fastest bowling, I think he might have sorted this out had he been exposed to Test cricket, and he was without doubt one of the best batsmen I ever played with at Surrey. We’d joined the county staff at the same time.

I stayed with him for about three weeks before I went back to staggering on with my cricket. To be honest I didn’t really know what else to do and, as my dad said, I needed to keep working because someone was going to have to pay the legal bills if Nicky and I did divorce. Little did I know how many bills, but it was good advice. I decided to go back out to India for the remainder of the tour. I gave a press conference when I got there because it seemed like the best way to deal with the loads of questions the reporters wanted to ask. Hopefully I’d get all that straight out the way. I recall someone asking me whether I accepted that my marriage was over. I said ‘Yes’, but don’t think I really meant it.

I made a conscious effort to appear happier, but behind the scenes was not making the necessary sacrifices to get my game back to where it should have been. I was still drinking and smoking and not training. I’d missed the last two Tests by returning home and we were now involved in a series of six one-day internationals, which was even more physically demanding. I remember a game in Kanpur in which I held the innings together with an unbeaten 36, and felt good that I’d contributed something.

We tied an exciting series 3–3 but, despite my efforts, my heart wasn’t in it which was disappointing because India’s like no other place to play cricket. You’re on a level with movie stars, mobbed by thousands of fans, and that’s just going to a net session. But there had been too many sad moments earlier in the tour for me to enjoy it.

When we moved on to New Zealand I tried even harder to pick myself up by socializing more. What I was actually doing, though, was running away from my situation. I got it into my head that I had to enjoy myself, and I was determined to make the most of every day. It turned into quite a boozy trip. For me there was certainly more drinking on that tour than on any other I’d been on, but I did briefly train hard.

I HAD A BAD EXPERIENCE during the one-day series at the beginning of that 2002 tour, and it brought me face to face with the pain of my position and reminded me that escape was not that easy. A group of New Zealand supporters had formed themselves along the lines of England’s ‘Barmy Army’, called ‘Beige Thirteen’, and they could be relied on to give the opposition plenty of stick. In the second match in Wellington, they singled me out for treatment, sledging me mercilessly while I was fielding on the boundary. This was where the tennis jokes started. They shouted out stuff like, ‘15-love!’, or ‘Vorster’s shagging your wife!’, or ‘Who’s feeding your kids?’

I remember coming off the pitch and Nasser saying to me, ‘What was that all about? What was that bloke with the megaphone shouting?’

‘Mate, did you not hear them?’ I said, incredulous. ‘They were going on about my wife, yelling, “15-love!”. You must have heard them.’

‘Oh mate, sorry. You should have told me. I’d have moved you.’

‘Well, it’s too bloody late now.’

It was an appalling experience and cut me up badly.

Once the first-class programme began, I got off to a terrible start in the first warm-up, a horribly windy match in Queenstown, but was happy to miss the next game and just practice in the nets the day before the first Test. For some reason, maybe because I wasn’t having so much contact with Nicky now, I was more focused than I’d been since my life started going out of control.

One of the problems I’d had in India was that I’d started to question my ability as a cricketer. Could I, this bloke whose wife had left him, still perform on the big stage? I struggled to picture myself scoring another century for England but, somehow, in the first Test in Christchurch, miraculously it happened. Everything just went for me. The wicket, earlier in the game a green seamer on which both sides were bowled out cheaply, had calmed down by the time we batted again, and Chris Cairns had injured his knee and could not bowl.

I went out to bat early on the third day with the bowlers fresh, and was dropped in the slips second ball by Nathan Astle. My second bit of good luck was batting with Freddie Flintoff, a good distraction. Fred was then the side’s promising young all-rounder but he was without a score for a long time, and was getting a lot of stick. I thought he just needed to understand what was required to achieve at the top level.

I liked him and wanted him to do well because he was a big spirit in the dressing-room. I’d played alongside him for England on and off for three years, and had tried to give him advice a few times, but maybe he just hadn’t been ready to listen. Now, I just kept telling him to play his natural game but keep a tight defence to the good balls. Meanwhile, I played quite aggressively at the other end. That we’d gone out the night before, playing pool and drinking Guinness — five or six pints in my case — in the Irish bar across the road from the team hotel, boosted our comradeship. It was an incredible partnership to be involved in, and I was thrilled when Fred got his maiden Test hundred.

In the state of mind I was then in, I didn’t give a great deal of thought to what I was doing. I just went for everything pitched outside off stump. One of the square boundaries was quite short — I used my nous as much as I could and took it on. Fred and I dealt in boundaries, basically. I hit 18 fours in my hundred and Fred had 21 in his. Later on, I hit five sixes — not something that often happened! I gave a bloke called Chris Drum a fearful beating and Fred got stuck into Ian Butler, who was making his Test debut. There was a period when we were charging along at more than ten an over!

A cold shiver went through me when I reached my hundred. I felt proud that I’d managed to score a century again for England, but still didn’t want to take my helmet off to acknowledge the crowd. It was strange, but I didn’t want people to see my face. I felt as though I’d shown people I was trying to climb back up again, but I knew I still didn’t have a grip on things. That innings was pure escapism, and one of the reasons things went so well was that I didn’t want it to end. Being out in the middle, batting was so much better than sitting in the dressing-room thinking about my problems. We declared when I got to 200. It felt like a big achievement -1 didn’t find out until later that it was the second-fastest double-century ever scored for England — but even as I was walking off I was thinking what I was going to say to the press. I wanted to dedicate those two hundreds to my children, Henry and Amelia, which is what I did. Despite an even faster double-century from Astle himself, we won the game on St Patrick’s Day and some of us — especially me, Fred and Butch — took it as a cue to celebrate for two or three days.

To the outsider, it certainly gave the impression that I was okay; perhaps it even convinced me for a time. But had Astle clung onto that chance, my contribution to the winter tours would have been nothing special. Not that I gloated at his dropping me. In the 1996 World Cup, I cost us our opening fixture against New Zealand in Ahmedabad (as you can imagine, not my favourite city in the world) by putting him down early on in his century. I’d also once dropped Matthew Elliott in an Ashes Test at Leeds before he reached 30, and he went on to make nearly 200, so I knew all about the humiliation of standing in the field watching a bloke who should be back in the pavilion enjoying himself at your expense.

The euphoria was short-lived. The next day, Nicky dropped another bombshell and did something she’d always said she’d never do. She did a spread in the Sunday Mirror saying, ‘He’s no hero, he’s a serial cheat.’ My brother Alan read it to me over the phone. This was the first newspaper article done by either of us about our private life and it devastated me. It was something she’d said she would never do. It was clear to me that the sole intention of the piece was to portray me in a bad light and in order to do that had fabricated many incidents. It was so unfair, and I felt she had publicly betrayed me. It showed how far things had deteriorated between the two of us.

Back on the pitch, we couldn’t hold onto our lead in the series, which ended 1–1, a fair reflection of how the sides had played. We were distracted, to say the least, by the news of the tragic death of Ben Hollioake (which I’ll come to later) during the second game, but New Zealand wanted it more in the final match in Auckland where our attempts to slow down the over-rate, after rain had ruined the first two days, badly backfired. A new rule had come in, allowing play to continue on grounds where there were floodlights and Eden Park, a rugby venue, certainly had those. But they were far from perfect for cricket, and there was, as yet, no provision for coming off when the natural light had been overtaken by artificial light (as happened later). So, on the fourth evening, New Zealand were able to bat on until nearly 8pm, by which time the moon was shining bright and the fielders lost any balls hit high up against the black sky. Even if it was legitimate, it was an utter farce and allowed New Zealand to put enough runs on the board to give themselves a chance to bowl us out on the final day.

To make matters worse, I was given out caught behind off Daryl Tuffey by local umpire Doug Cowie, even though the only contact was bat brushing pad. It was my own fault. At one point the previous night, we’d gathered round the umpires in an attempt to persuade them that whatever the regulations stated it was simply too dark for us to field. I’d rather unwisely overstepped the mark in my arm-twisting. And earlier in the game I’d been at the non-striker’s end when Cowie had given out Flintoff caught behind, even though his bat was inches away from the ball; I could see the gap from where I was standing, and was amazed Cowie hadn’t seen it as well. Now, I said to him, ‘Look Doug, you had problems seeing it in daylight, let alone late at night …’ It raised a smile from Fred, but Cowie wasn’t impressed. ‘There’s no need for that,’ he said sternly.

I don’t know whether it influenced his decision the next day but, on reflection, I realized I’d given him an opportunity to exercise a bit of revenge and it might have been much better if I’d kept my mouth shut. He might have given me the benefit of the doubt.

UMPIRES CAN HOLD GRUDGES. Early in my career, Surrey were not a popular side and at times we pushed things to the limit with our gamesmanship. We faced accusations of excessive appealing and, in the 1991 season, ball tampering. Some officials seemed to think of us as ‘city slickers’ who needed taking down a peg. In the end, we realized that the only way to change things for the better was to clean up our act, which we did. But I remember, during an early season game against Durham, showing my displeasure at Don Oslear giving me out lbw to Ian Botham, then in the twilight of his great career. I glowered at Oslear as I trudged away, so slowly that Botham shouted at me to get off the field, sharpish. In later years I became firm friends with ‘Beefy’, but back then to him I was just another whippersnapper.

After play, I was summoned to the umpires’ room where Oslear warned me that I was heading up a few cul-de-sacs in life if I thought I was never out. I was unrepentant and pretty outspoken. I knew he didn’t like Surrey because he had accused us of ball-tampering the previous season. I told him that I thought England’s best all-rounder had got him under his thumb. As it happened, he didn’t spend much more time on the umpiring list, but needless to say Don didn’t do me too many favours thereafter. It was clearly a lesson I’d forgotten, come Auckland 2002. It pretty much summed up my life at that stage. My luck was out.

I got back to England in early April. I took a taxi from the airport to the house, opened the front door, dropped my bags on the floor and looked around at what was now a deserted home. I’d paid Nicky enough money to buy a four-bedroom house, and Kieron had moved in with her. Here, now, for the first time, I was confronted with the full awfulness of my situation. What I saw was a sight I’d been trying to avoid thinking about.

I’d come home to a silent house with no children. Nicky had left me just one bed, one TV, an old two-piece sofa and, I soon discovered, a broken central heating system. I sat at the foot of the stairs, feeling utterly devastated, and I cried. I’d finally run out of distractions.

From this point, I became increasingly incapable of compartmentalizing my life, keeping my private problems separate from my cricket. I just couldn’t do it. Sometimes I’d think I could cope, but then something would drag me back down. It was like trying to climb a mountain of ice, with nothing to cling on to. Occasionally I’d get so far up and then, bam, back down again.

I tried to motivate myself in my cricket by saying, ‘Come on, do it for the children’, but then I’d hear or see something, maybe children walking down the road who were a similar age to Henry and Amelia, and all of a sudden tears would well up. ‘Fucking hell, get me out of here.’ So I’d have another beer, another smoke. ‘What’s happening to me?’

I was starting to realize that I was doing myself damage and that this wasn’t a way out. I was becoming seriously unfit, short of sleep and my mind was all over the place. The way I was carrying on was just a way of escape, and even then it only lasted a few hours at a time. I had to deal with it but I didn’t know how.

I did play one more big innings, though, before that India Test at Lord’s, and it was another of those times during this period when finding a partner to bat with — Matthew Hoggard, our No 11, in the second Test against Sri Lanka at Edgbaston in June — took my mind off things, and briefly enabled me to function again. Once I got a feel for an innings and a situation, I could still do it, but it was very sporadic.

We were well in control by the time I went out to bat late on the second day. Inspired by some high-quality bowling from Andrew Caddick, we’d bowled out Sri Lanka for 162 and a big stand from Trescothick and Butcher had helped push us to 176 in front when I went out to bat. It was another of those times when it would have been easy to give it away, but the pitch was quiet and we wanted a big lead otherwise it was quite possible Sri Lanka would bat their way out of trouble. A steady trickle of wickets at the other end helped concentrate my mind and, when Hoggard walked out with a bat in his hand not long before lunch the next day, I was still there, on 61, having seen six partners depart.

A lot was in our favour — Muttiah Muralitharan, Sri Lanka’s match-winning bowler, was not fully fit — but it was still an amazing partnership. So much went as planned. I think Hoggie and I stayed together for 30 overs, and we controlled the strike so well that in all but one over I was on strike for the first ball. It really demoralized the fielders. Not that Hoggie was a mug with the bat; as he was quick to tell everyone, a couple of years after this he almost scored a century for Yorkshire as night-watchman. His talent was just keeping things simple: blocking, leaving, trying nothing fancy. By the end, I was happy to let him face most of the over, and overall I think he took slightly more of the strike than I did during our partnership.

We had some fun setting ourselves targets, 10 runs at a time, his score, my score, our partnership. By talking us through things, I managed to keep us focused. In the end, I was out first, cutting high to third man, but by that point I’d got 123 and was pretty happy with what we’d achieved. We’d built up a lead of almost 400, and it was enough to set up a commanding win.

It was great to escape the reality of my personal situation for as many hours as I could manage on the pitch. It’s funny, but I found myself relaxed and feeling more in control during that innings than I had felt for weeks off the pitch. My mind had been doing strange things to me. I was in increasingly bad shape, physically and mentally. I began to question the point of my playing cricket. When men went out to work, they did it for their families, and that became their motivation. I didn’t want to play just for myself. I thought, ‘Yeah, well, you may have just got a Test hundred against Sri Lanka, but did it really give you a lift?’ And the answer was, ‘No it didn’t.’ As soon as the applause stopped and I came off the field, I felt empty inside. I needed the happiness of a family to go back home to if my cricket was to have a purpose. I was desperately missing my children.