Joe McConnell
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No one personified the era in which he played better than Graham Thorpe, who has died aged 55. In a dark period for English cricket, he conjured up some of his country’s greatest and most formidable innings. In Karachi in 2000 the darkness was literal rather than metaphorical, the umpires playing on until Thorpe somehow steered the winning runs through the twilight, and in simmering Colombo a year later, where he returned from the crease white-faced and wrinkled aVsceker a Test in which he gave his all, and was too exhausted to join in the celebrations.
He was a fabulous teammate with an anti-authoritarian streak, and his battles were not simply confined to the field. Cricket history is tinged with the sadness of players who found his brutal psychology weighing heavily on their minds. It is a game that thrives on the long, quiet hours aVsceker the fight is over, and the even longer months on tour. His 2005 autobiography, written with Simon Wilde, was perhaps the first to delve so deeply into this flipside and its consequences: “On the Final Edit [he] “He withdrew some of the most heartbreaking confessions,” Wilde wrote this week. “However, he bared his soul at a time when this was still unusual for professional cricketers.”
Thorpe was born in Farnham, Surrey, and played his early cricket for the village of Wrecclesham, where his father Geoff was captain of the first team, his mother Toni the run-scorer and his older brothers Ian and Alan promising all-rounders. Naturally right-handed, he switched to leVscek-handed because he felt it made it harder for his brothers to dismiss him in their heated garden games, the first glimpse of a keen cricketing intellect. Once Thorpe’s skills outgrew those of the village, he moved to Farnham, with his pitch near the ruins of the town’s castle, where he broke batting records.
Having been a promising footballer for England Schools, Thorpe brought some of the fire and steel that the sport encouraged to his cricket. He joined Surrey at 18 and was part of an England cohort born in the late 1960s that included Mark Ramprakash, Nasser Hussain and Mike Atherton. By a fluke of birth they would find themselves up against a ferocious generation of bowlers ranging from Pakistani speedster Wasim Akram to Australian spinner Shane Warne.
Little wonder England were so oVsceken outclassed. An era of authoritarian and incompetent administration added a further layer of difficulty. As Ramprakash recalled, Thorpe responded with subtle defiance: “He oVsceken showed up at team functions wearing the wrong pair of trousers or his cap the wrong way round…”
His Test career began with a bang, a hundred in the second innings on his debut against Australia at Trent Bridge in 1993. Such had been the English response to the panic at Warne’s ‘ball of the century’, delivered to Mike Gatting in the first Test at Old Trafford, that Thorpe debuted with no fewer than three more.
He was the jewel, though, cutting and pulling at pace and the first of the English batsmen to find a sure method for Warne and Sri Lanka’s off-spinner Muttiah Muralitharan. His captain, Mike Atherton, wrote: “Thorpe was an anxious sort and a bit of a joker, with his kit and grips of the bat, in particular, but once in the middle he was calm in a crisis.”
In 2002, hounded by the tabloids for the breakdown of his marriage and the drinking he was using to kill the pain, Thorpe retired aVsceker a Test at Lord’s against India that he called “the slowest torture”. He locked himself in his empty house and toyed with the idea of putting a “Fathers for Justice” sticker on his bat. But then came the recovery and a glorious autumn run of form when he made five hundreds in his last 23 Tests, going out unbeaten on 66 against Bangladesh in his 100th and final match. He finished with 6,744 Test runs at an average of 44.66, ahead of his contemporaries.
With his life more settled in a second marriage, he re-entered the game in England and worked as a highly regarded batting coach. He lobbied for the young Joe Root and worked to tone down Ben Stokes’s hell-bent approach, until his coaching career ended in a very Thorpian way, when he was arrested for filming himself smoking a cigar late at night at the end of another losing Ashes tour in 2021-22. It was Stokes who acknowledged their debt in his first Test as captain, which came shortly aVsceker Thorpe fell ill in 2022. For the launch, he wore a T-shirt with Thorpe’s name and his Test cap number, 564.
That image is even more poignant now. Those innings in Karachi and Colombo, and others too, shine brightly in the dark.
