Читать книгу Graham Thorpe: Rising from the Ashes - Graham Thorpe - Страница 7

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.

My condition wasn’t helped by an incident before the next Test against Sri Lanka, at Old Trafford, when I tripped over Michael Vaughan. We were playing a warm-up game of football and I badly hurt my ankle. I still played in the Test but there was a lot of bruising, and I wasn’t fit going into the triangular one-day series that preceded the Tests with India. I only played a few times, missing an epic final against India when we scored a massive 325 but still lost.

Even before the problems began with Nicky, I had talked to Nasser and Duncan about the possibility of retiring from one-day cricket, telling them that something had to give because I was on the road too much. But the truth was that by this stage I was so messed up I wasn’t practising hard or training at all. Sometimes you can get away with a few things in Test cricket, but in the one-day game you can’t get away with anything. You’ve got to be very agile in the field, and I knew how the coach viewed one-day cricket. Duncan wanted energy and athletes, not some bloke whose mind kept drifting off and who wasn’t working at his game.

On the day of the final, I publicly announced I was giving up one-day cricket. The press release said something about me wanting to spend more time sorting out my private life, which was true, but whatever the outcome this was a permanent decision. The next World Cup was only a few months away but I wasn’t coming back. I was done and dusted with one-day cricket.

I remember standing with Marcus Trescothick on the outfield for the presentation ceremony that evening. In his enlightened state — he’d scored a brilliant hundred that afternoon — he could see that, all right, we’d lost, but it had been a great final, in front of a full house at Lord’s. ‘Thorpey,’ he asked in his Cornish accent, ‘You’re 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?’

Maybe that showed how other people can’t see what’s going on inside you. But maybe it also summed up what a poor state I was in; over the years I’d had so much enjoyment out of cricket, the winning, the losing, the camaraderie, but now I just couldn’t see the point. I could no longer feel a thing.

‘Tres, mate,’ I replied, ‘I couldn’t give a fuck.’

But if I thought retiring from one-day cricket would help keep me together, I didn’t know how low I’d become. All I could see was pain and heartache. Sport could not provide me with an escape any longer. Walking away altogether was going to be pretty embarrassing but, by the later stages of the Lord’s Test match against India, which came just two weeks after that one-day final, that was my over-riding desire. I just didn’t want to be in the spotlight any more. I’d been an England cricketer for nine years and now it was enough.

All sorts of things were buzzing through my head but, increasingly, I was having these fantasies. ‘I’m going to leave the country. I’ll go to America and start a new life.’ I found it hard to imagine still living in England. And I think I would have left but for the fact it would obviously have made seeing Henry and Amelia all the more harder, if not impossible. And, crazy though it sounds, I hadn’t given up on Nicky having me back.