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No one epitomised the era in which he played better than Graham Thorpe, who has died aged 55. During a benighted time for English cricket he summoned some of his country’s greatest and most redoubtable 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 gloaming, and in steaming-hot Colombo a year later, where he returned from the crease white-faced and wrung out after a Test in which he gave everything, and was too drained to join the celebrations.
He was a fabulous teammate with an anti-authoritarian streak, and his battles were not simply confined to the field. Cricket’s history is streaked with the sadness of players who found its brutal psychology lay heavily on their minds. It’s a game that exploits the long, quiet hours when combat is over, and the even longer months away on tour. His 2005 autobiography, written with Simon Wilde, was perhaps the first to dig so deeply into this flipside and its consequences: “At the final edit [he] withdrew some of the more harrowing confessions,” Wilde wrote this week. “Even so, 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 first-team skipper, his mum Toni the scorer and his older brothers Ian and Alan budding all-rounders. Naturally right-handed, he switched to leftie because he felt it made it harder for his brothers to dismiss him in their fierce back garden matches, the early inkling of a sharp cricketing intellect. Once Thorpe’s abilities outgrew the village green, he moved to Farnham with its ground by the ruins of the town’s castle, where he broke batting records.
Having been a promising footballer for England Schools, Thorpe took some of the bristle and steel that sport encouraged into his cricket. He joined Surrey as an 18-year-old, and was part of an English cohort born in the late 1960s that included Mark Ramprakash, Nasser Hussain and Mike Atherton. By fluke of birth they would find themselves up against a ferocious generation of bowlers that ran from Pakistani paceman Wasim Akram to the Australian leg spinner Shane Warne.
Small wonder that England were so often outgunned. An era of high-handed and incompetent administration added to the degree of difficulty. As Ramprakash remembered, Thorpe responded with subtle defiance: “He would often turn up to team functions wearing the wrong pair of trousers or his cap backwards . . . ”
His Test career began with a bang, a hundred in the second innings of his debut against Australia at Trent Bridge in 1993. Such had been the panicky English response to Warne’s “ball of the century”, delivered to Mike Gatting in the first Test at Old Trafford, that Thorpe debuted with no less than three others.
He was the gem, though, able to cut and pull high pace and the first of the England batters to find a secure method for Warne and the Sri Lankan off spinner Muttiah Muralitharan. His captain, Mike Atherton, wrote: “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.”
In 2002, hounded by the tabloids over the breakdown of his marriage and drinking to kill the pain, Thorpe withdrew after a Test at Lord’s against India that he called “the slowest torture.” He shut himself away in his empty house and toyed with the idea of placing a Fathers 4 Justice sticker on his bat. But then came recovery and a glorious autumnal run of form when he made five hundreds in his last 23 Tests, walking off unbeaten on 66 against Bangladesh in his 100th and final game. He ended 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 recommitted to England and worked as a highly-regarded batting coach. He lobbied for the young Joe Root and worked to smooth Ben Stokes’ hell-for-leather approach, until his coaching career came to an end in very Thorpian manner, busted for filming himself smoking a late-night cigar 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 after Thorpe became ill in 2022. For the toss, he wore a shirt bearing Thorpe’s name and Test cap number, 564.
That image is even more poignant now. Those innings in Karachi and Colombo, and others too, burn brightly through the dark.
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