Graham Thorpe 1969-2024

GH on a great cricketer and troubled man

Before Marcus Trescothick, there was Graham Thorpe.  There was much acclaim and sympathy when Trescothick sixteen years ago published Coming Back To Me (2008), the inside story of the mental torment that had curtailed his Test career; but in some ways Thorpe, in Rising From The Ashes (2005), had anticipated the sub-genre of memoirs exposing players at their rawest and most vulnerable, while somehow not quite eliciting the same sympathy.  Perhaps it was felt that Thorpe, by his drinking and philandering, was more truly the author of his own sorrows.  But given the hopeful tone of Thorpe’s title, there is now something additionally poignant about such passages as this:

I infuriated myself with the rubbishy soundbites I spouted to the press about how I’d been through a difficult period but was now feeling fine. I’d go back to my hotel room and think to myself: ‘How the fuck could you say that? When clearly you’re not all right?’ But I was trying to portray an image of myself as being back on my feet.  Perhaps if I said it enough times it might actually come true.

It came true enough that Thorpe was able to build a second marriage on the ruins of his first, and finish his troubled career on good terms with the game.  But the balance was seldom other than precarious.  He lost his job as England’s batting coach after the 2021-22 Ashes, then had to forgo an appointment with Afghanistan for undisclosed reasons that boded ill.  Thorpe’s career had been notable for comebacks, including a soul-stirring hundred at the Oval in 2003.  But this time there was to be no return.  All that’s left are memories, and movingly evoked they have been: Mark Ramprakash refers to Thorpe’s stubborn individualism , Vic Marks to his sang froid in difficult conditions , Andrew Miller to his affirming pluck.  Wasim Akram has called him ‘the best left hander he ever bowled to’, perhaps recalling this.

I first glimpsed Thorpe as a precocious teenage county cricketer at the Oval in 1989.  Surrey had a batter whom everyone tipped for national honours in Alec Stewart - when he twiddled his bat and surveyed the stands, it was almost like Stewy was trying to pick out the England selector in the crowd.  But I saw Thorpe bat a few times and sensed he might be just as good - he already had a complete ground game, a compact defence, fluent cover drive and rasping cut, plus that busyness characteristic of good players who just want to get in amongst it.  I was a little surprised it took him four more years to get to the top, and not at all surprised when he made a century on his Test debut, even if his Ashes career ended with only two more: he was injured after one Test in 1998-99, injured for the whole of 2001, withdrew for personal reasons from 2002-3.  

For Thorpe’s twelve years as an international proved almost as chequered as England’s: he played 100 Tests while also missing forty-two.  It was not, Thorpe commented in Rising, an era where a player enjoyed much reinforcement: ‘Not everyone in the team was always happy for you when you did well.’  Or perhaps, Mike Atherton observed, this sense was sharpened by Thorpe’s particular sensitivity to environment and mood: ‘A happy, contented Graham Thorpe is a world-class player, his presence beneficial to any team. If something off the field is eating away at him he cannot put it to the back of his mind and concentrate on his cricket.’  Sometimes, of course, what was eating him would have devoured anyone.  The passages in Rising where Thorpe is trying to play a Test at Lord’s in 2002 while lawyers duke out his divorce are as hard to look away from as to read.

Thorpe clung to cricket, he explained, because he felt compelled, because it seemed like there was no alternative: ‘I kept playing because I felt it would help me keep a grip on things.  What else was I supposed to do?’  But the returns were diminishing: ‘Yeah, well, you may have just got a Test hundred against Sri Lanka but did it really give you a lift?’ There is a particularly poignant scene in Rising where Thorpe, then glimpsing another career abyss, is quizzed by a younger teammate after an exciting, high-scoring ODI at Lord’s.  ‘You’re not going to give all this up are you?  You don’t want to do this any more?  Don’t you think you’ll miss it?’ Thorpe stares grimly ahead and replies that he ‘could not give a fuck.’ The bright-eyed interlocutor is none other than Marcus Trescothick.