Читать книгу Graham Thorpe: Rising from the Ashes - Graham Thorpe - Страница 9

I WAS THE youngest in our family and often the most junior member of the teams I played in when I was growing up, so perhaps I came to accept there were always others around to take the big decisions and occupy the limelight. I was happy enough keeping quiet in the background. But in cricketing terms, I was reckoned to have a good head on my shoulders from a young age. In fact younger brothers in sporting families often grow up fast by playing alongside their elder siblings — Robin Smith and Ben Hollioake, for example — and it certainly helped me.

Being the youngest of three boys — Ian was four years older and Alan two -1 had to fight for every little reward I could get. Being bigger and stronger, they dominated our games of football and cricket, and I had to learn fast and work extra hard just to keep up. I wasn’t exceptionally stylish or talented but I was tenacious, determined and confident. We were always encouraged by my father, who played sport at the weekends, and my mother who, in later years, became an expert scorer at our various cricket matches.

Things weren’t easy for the family. My father worked as a draughtsman and later as an engineering surveyor, but I don’t think he earned a particularly big salary. I shared a room with one of my brothers until I was eight, when we had an extension built and we all got our own bedroom. With fields at the back of the garden we had lots of space to play in and, frankly, that was all we wanted.

We were lucky to live in a village that had several youth teams. Wrecclesham, a couple of miles west of Farnham in Surrey, had four sides from the under-11s to the under-17s, and every Friday night up to 40 kids would turn up for practice sessions run by a guy called Tony Hughes. I remember once playing for the under-17s at the age of eight. Someone dropped out and, as we only lived up the road from the ground, I was asked if I’d go along. I was very nervous. I didn’t have to bat — they’d stuck me down at No 11 — but I took a catch, pretty straightforward, but was thrilled when these big lads patted me on the head and said, ‘Great catch, youngster.’ It felt like I’d done something really good. Like my father, but not my brothers, I batted left-handed, though I was pretty much right-handed at everything else.

I was 13 when I first played for Wrecclesham first XI, the village team, in the I’Anson League. The team was basically made up of adults. Late in my second season, I scored my first century at a lovely ground down at Frensham when we’d only needed around 150 to win. I think I was the youngest person ever to score a hundred in the I’Anson League, but I never played for the village again. Alan and Ian were already turning out for Farnham where there was a better standard of cricket, and I was encouraged to follow them by a chap called Jim Banks, who was involved with Farnham but also helped run Surrey’s youth set-up.

The Surrey Championship, in which Farnham played, featured a lot of county second XI players, so by the age of 15 I was facing some pretty good adult players. I scored 90 in my first game for the first XI. Playing on some ordinary club wickets helped shape my technique, teaching me to play soft and late, judge a run and place my shots. One of my best knocks was a hundred against Morden Wanderers, Alec Stewart’s old team, who had a lot of second XI wide boys playing for them who were quite chirpy.

Surrey had a good youth system that processed a lot of young players like Martin and Darren Bicknell, Alistair Brown, Mark Butcher, Adam Hollioake and myself. I was involved with the county from the under-11s upwards. I can remember once my granddad coming to watch me play for the under-11s at Morden, and me getting out for nought and saying I didn’t want to play any more. I also recall playing in front of Micky Stewart, Alec’s father, who managed Surrey and was about to go on and do the same job for England, and Geoff Arnold, the club coach, who sometimes gave me lifts home when I started going up to the Oval. In the winters, the county held youth sessions in Guildford and you’d go over there, have your nets, and get a little report at the end of it. I was also invited to have net sessions with the Surrey squad in the winter at Roehampton when I was 16. It served as a useful opportunity to have driving lessons with my dad on the way, which meant we were usually not talking by the time we got there!

It hadn’t really crossed my mind that I could make a career out of cricket until Surrey offered me a two-year contract for the 1988 and 1989 seasons. I was 18 and had just finished at Farnham College, where I’d spent the previous few years re-taking some O-levels and starting, but not finishing, a couple of A-levels. My results clearly showed I devoted more time to sport than homework.

I had spent the summer happily earning a bit of money gardening and driving a van for an off-licence, while playing a few games for Surrey under-19s and in representative schools cricket. I’d first played for the county under-19s at 16 which, while probably a sign of a good player, was not unheard of. No surprise that Wisden described my captaincy of English Schools Under-16s against Wales and Scotland as being ‘quiet and efficient’.

Surrey’s offer wasn’t difficult to accept. They were to pay me £3,000 for each of the two seasons, which seemed riches indeed (this rose to £12,500 after I got my first XI cap in 1991). Whereas my brothers had seemed to know what careers they wanted, I hadn’t had a clue. Whenever my parents asked, I’d say something like, ‘I’ll be all right. Something will happen.’ Well, now it had, and they seemed happy for me to give cricket a go. I think Micky Stewart, who once generously described me as the most talented young sportsman in the country, had a chat with them about the pros and cons of a sporting career.

The only complication was that I was also invited for football trials with Brentford. I loved football and was also above average at that. I’d played a lot with my brothers and the Bicknell boys, Martin and Darren, for Old Farnhamians in the Guildford and District League, and we were a pretty competitive lot. The Thorpes made an uncompromising midfield trio. I’d already been to trials with Southampton, although I’d chosen not to finish them, and even once decided not to go on a three-week cricket tour of Australia with Surrey under-17s because I didn’t want to miss playing football. I was 15. For a long time, football came first.

But my football career was about to go belly-up. That winter, I spent several weekends going up to Lilleshall on the train with a mate of mine, Dean Fosberry, for trials with the England Schools under-18s and was selected as sweeper for a series of internationals. But meantime I got sent off in a local club match after some bloke crashed into me with a double-footed tackle. It was the sort of crude challenge that was pretty common in the games we played on Saturdays. The guy was still on the ground when I came down on him with a right boot, bang in front of the ref. This got back to the English Schools FA, who suspended me for the last match of the tournament against Scotland.

I was devastated that a minor incident in a minor match had reached such high quarters. The Schools FA asked me to travel to Scotland to talk about my indiscipline, but I told them I wasn’t prepared to go all that way for a chat. So I was already showing signs of being headstrong back then. I continued to play with Old Farnhamians for two more seasons before giving up after an opponent head-butted me, a few weeks before I was leaving for my first England A cricket tour. Martin Bicknell and I both found that becoming professional cricketers made us marked men in football. It wasn’t worth the trouble. It was ironic when 10 years later the Schools FA management guy who’d asked me up to Scotland congratulated me at an Oval Test match, and said I’d made the right decision!

BEING A SMALL-TOWN BOY whose horizons had yet to expand, I was filled with apprehension at the idea of joining Surrey. It was a big club with an imposing tradition of success, even if it then hadn’t won a trophy for several years. The pavilion was full of reminders of the great side of the Fifties that had won seven championships in a row, and of the many great England cricketers like Sir Jack Hobbs, Ken Barrington, Peter May, Jim Laker and Sir Alec Bedser.

I looked around the staff and saw people like Sylvester Clarke, Tony Gray, Monte Lynch, David Smith and Jack Richards, who’d all played at international level, and Alec Stewart and Martin Bicknell who’d come up through the same system as me but already appeared destined to play for England. I’d first played district cricket with Martin at the age of nine, and teased him that I’d got into the England Under-15 team as a bowler ahead of him. We were the same age but he’d signed for the county two years earlier at 16, and had already enjoyed quite a lot of success. I certainly didn’t regard myself as his equal.

I was excited and nervous; I really wanted to do it. Perhaps it helped that dad was keener on football than cricket. He just wanted me to enjoy it but my mum, on the other hand, was really enthusiastic. I remember being really embarrassed when I overheard her telling Mike Edwards, the Surrey Young Cricketers manager, that if they didn’t sign me she would make sure that Sussex did!

I had embarked on a huge change. My university was second XI cricket and England A tours. I’d caught the occasional tantalizing glimpse of this life when playing for the under-19s against the Surrey second XI. During a rain break I watched their lads playing cards, with a big pot of money in the middle. Now I was one of them, playing cricket during the day and going out on the pull at night!

My first away trip was to Glastonbury. We started the first evening in the bar, as you do. We had a drink, then something to eat. Then another drink. One thing led to another and before I knew it we’d had half a dozen pints. I eventually got to bed thinking, ‘Christ, I’ve got to get up and play cricket tomorrow.’ I clearly remember a few of the lads being sick in the dressing-room the next morning. Such was the culture I had entered. At 18, of course, you think it’s all bloody marvellous.

We had a pretty strong side in 1988 and won the second XI championship without being beaten. I don’t know if it was the culture shock, but I made a pretty moderate contribution with the bat before putting together a couple of hundreds towards the end of the season. One was on a quite lively wicket at Old Trafford, where Tony Murphy, who joined Surrey the following year, gave us a real going over. He was a tenacious bloke who’d have a few pints and then try and hit you on the head the next morning. My overall figures for the season weren’t too bad. I played in every championship match, scored more than 700 runs and took 25 wickets with my little away-swingers.

In June, during a spate of injuries, I was given my first run in the first XI. I played three matches at the Oval, two in the championship and one against Cambridge University in which I scored an aggressive, unbeaten hundred. Looking at the scorecard in Wisden, I must have scored some runs against Cambridge captain Michael Atherton’s filthy leg-breaks. Our bowling careers lasted about as long as each other’s!

The Cambridge match wasn’t as intense as the second XI championship, and certainly nothing like as competitive as my first-team debut the previous week against Leicestershire. I think I was preferred to the likes of Alistair Brown because of my bowling (!), and throughout that season Surrey struggled to field a settled attack. We had problems with our two West Indian overseas players: Sylvester Clarke was troubled by injuries and was suspended after failing to report for a match in Swansea, and Tony Gray lost form completely. They stuck me down at No 8.

It was another huge jump. The bowling seemed unbelievably quick and certainly tested your nerve. Leicestershire had Phil DeFreitas, George Ferris and Jonathan Agnew in their attack, and on the Oval wickets in those days any half-decent fast bowler could make it go through. I was hit god knows how many times. DeFreitas in particular gave me a horrible going over and dished out a few verbals to go with it. Nothing too nasty, but comments designed to intimidate a kid like me.

I didn’t respond, I just kept my mouth shut and hid behind my helmet. I was dropped in the gully before I scored my first run but held up an end in both innings, scraping 15 runs in the first and 16 in the second. But I got a couple of wickets, and good ones too: David Gower, one of England’s greatest left-handers who the previous week had helped England save the Trent Bridge Test against West Indies, and Peter Willey. I was lucky with Gower: he was given out lbw off a big inside edge, something both he and I remember to this day. I made the papers for the first time, my local one writing up my first appearance as a momentous occasion. It felt good.

After my century against the undergraduates, I not only kept my place in the side to play Derbyshire but was moved up to No 3. It proved an over-promotion because I didn’t get many runs. Michael Holding, who was in his mid-thirties but still brisk, was Derbyshire’s spearhead, but it was another West Indian who gave me most trouble. Allan Warner, who had a dangerously quick bouncer, hit me on the helmet twice. Facing Holding was a huge thrill. If anything had got me interested in cricket it was watching the West Indians tour during that long, hot summer of 1976 when I was seven. The sight of Viv Richards with the bat and Holding and Andy Roberts bowling was awesome.

With Alec Stewart fit again for the first team after breaking a thumb, I spent the rest of that 1988 season — one unsuccessful Sunday league appearance aside — back in the second XI. But those two championship games told me I could expect a lot more quick bowling around my head in first-team cricket, and that this was something I’d have to work on. In truth, I was then a limited, orthodox player. I was too static in my stance, really just bouncing up and down on my feet without taking my hands back, but I did present the full face of the bat, was a good fielder and was prepared to work hard at my game. With the help of Micky Stewart, I corrected a tendency to fall to the off side. My footballing single-mindedness and competitiveness was a big help.

I’d cast my eye down the first XI and thought it would take a big effort to break in, but during the winter Monte Lynch broke his leg playing football and was ruled out for most of the 1989 season. I wasn’t called into the championship side for about a month as Jonathan Robinson and Paul Atkins, who like me had made their debuts the previous year but had been on the staff longer, were tried without success.

After that, I didn’t look back. I scored an unbeaten half-century in my first championship innings and, two matches later at Basingstoke, batted all day for my maiden championship hundred. This was a huge stride forward because Hampshire’s attack was led by Malcolm Marshall, who was still playing for the West Indies and was still one of the best bowlers in the world. It helped that I’d played on the ground before in youth cricket, and the wicket was slowish, but Marshall was frighteningly quick and good. I made a horribly nervous start. I had still not got many when Marshall smashed me, via the glove, on the helmet. The ball ballooned up for a catch but, as I began to trudge off, I saw the umpire signalling no-ball and wave me back. Great. So I got to face him some more!

Being small, Marshall’s trajectory was different from most other fast bowlers and he could do everything with the ball, though one of the hardest things for me was coming to terms with the fact I was playing against a guy I’d seen on TV so many times. He was like a god. I’d even pretended to be him in my back garden, for heaven’s sake! That innings made a lot of people sit up and take notice. It showed I was mentally resilient which, I’d later learn, was quite rare for a young player. I’d booked myself in as Surrey’s No 4 and my medium-paced dibbly-dobblers took a back seat for good.

Although I was coping pretty well on the pitch, I found life in the dressing-room difficult. I didn’t have a great relationship with Ian Greig, the captain. I think he was trying to impose a bit of discipline on a side that had seen a few changes in personnel, but he behaved like a headmaster and had a lot of rules which brought out the worst in me. The most intimidating thing was that the dressing-room at the Oval had a wall down the middle, one side for those who had been awarded their first-team caps, the other for those — like me — who hadn’t. You had to knock on the door if you wanted to go in to speak to the senior players. They’d say stuff like, ‘Oi, remember, I was capped in ‘85 …’ or ‘Just watch what you say’ and ‘Remember who you’re talking to …’ Sometimes it was done in a jokey fashion but it felt like I’d joined the army. I definitely felt some senior players didn’t want to give out much advice in case you’d take their place. This regime survived a few more years, and contributed to our continued lack of success.

Greig called me in for words many times. I’d drive in to the Oval, which was two hours from home, grab a sandwich, sit on the balcony eating it and he’d walk in and say, ‘What have we said about eating food here?’ I might have been a bit lippy and sulky at that stage — I was very much still learning about myself — but I had this bloke breathing down my neck from first thing in the morning. It was like he was saying, ‘This kid’s a bit precocious, maybe if we give him a kick now and then he might learn a thing or two.’ But my view was that, if anything, speaking to us like kids made us behave like kids, and it certainly didn’t bring out the best in me.

But there were some decent people like David Smith, who had a fearsome reputation for pinning people against the wall but was actually a good guy, Grahame Clinton who seemed to have seen everything on the county circuit, including every local casualty department, and Monte Lynch, my benefactor, who was a wonderful guy. They gave me a lot of advice. Then there was the young Keith Medlycott, our future coach but then a left-arm spinner who’d been in the first team a few seasons and had seen enough to know he didn’t like what was going on with the dressing-room hierarchy. He’d say to me, ‘This is a load of bollocks.’ I naturally became a Medders supporter. He wasn’t in awe of anyone and just wanted to get the job done, which I liked.

This was perhaps the start of my lengthy tussles with authority. Players are Very different people and yet I didn’t often see much flexibility in the way they were handled. It shouldn’t have been that difficult for someone to tap you on the shoulder and suggest you did something in a particular way, while offering some quiet words of encouragement. But more often I simply saw — and felt — whacks on the head which made me think, ‘Fuck you.’ Especially Ian Greig.

Despite all that, I had a very good first full season with the bat. I scored 1,132 runs at an average of 45, and found myself being written up as one of the up-and-coming England stars. What had made the situation even more exciting was that, for the first time, England were sending an A-team on tour that winter. I knew next to nothing about it but hit decent form at the right time, taking fifties off Lancashire and Essex in the build-up to the announcement. It came during Surrey’s second-last match, over the tannoy at the Oval. First, the full England side to go to the West Indies: Stewie and Medders were in that one, chosen for their first tours. Then the A-tour to Zimbabwe: Darren Bicknell was going, so too Martin Bicknell. And so was I. Brilliant!

I couldn’t believe it. It was a dream to be playing for the Surrey first XI but this was something else. This was major. I must have been on a high and celebrated by playing my biggest innings so far against Kent, scoring 154 and sharing a big stand with Monte, who’d finally returned to the side after his long lay-off.

I had a good tour. The pitches in Zimbabwe were slow and the attacks not very menacing, and I scored runs most times I batted. Scoring is hard work on slow pitches, but I refused to be shackled. I was even on the verge of a century in the final A Test when I was stumped via the wicket-keeper’s pads. Right at the end, news came through that Graham Gooch had broken his hand in Trinidad, and there was a buzz that one of us might be sent to the Caribbean as replacement. In the end, none of us went, but it seemed bizarre that not long before I’d thought breaking into the Surrey team would be hard, and now people were talking about me joining the England squad.

My cricketing horizons broadened in other ways on that tour. I was coached by Keith Fletcher, a former England captain, and played alongside guys like Atherton and Derek Pringle who’d played for England the previous summer. I also roomed with Athers. He was only a year older but as a player was on a different level altogether. I’d played youth cricket against him a few years earlier, and even then his wicket was easily the most prized.

I went home being written up as the next rising star but soon came back down to earth. I had an absolute shocker with Surrey. I don’t know why. It was a batsman’s summer and people were scoring mountains of runs left, right and centre. Maybe people had worked out my game. They say your second season is difficult. I don’t think I’d changed but maybe I had put too much pressure on myself.

Surrey stuck with me, but after I was out for a pair twice in three championship matches, Greig told me they were sending me back to the second team. I spent the last month of the 1990 season there. I was pretty levelheaded but found it a confusing experience. I had gone up and come down so quickly that I started to doubt myself. I wasn’t in the habit of dwelling on failures, but I dwelt on them now. If there was a point in my career when I could have slipped into obscurity, this was it. But amazingly, Keith Fletcher — who may have been a quietly spoken, undemonstrative bloke but knew his mind when it came to judging a cricketer — stuck his neck out and got me on the A-tour of Sri Lanka that winter. I was a bit embarrassed. I knew my stats didn’t really add up. Later, England often backed people who were out of form, but back then it was far more unusual. Keith said later that he had been certain, from seeing me play as a 15-year-old, that I would play for England. Boosted by his encouragement, I got back in the runs on that tour. It taught me not to lose faith, and never to get carried away.

Little did I know it at the time but I was now set upon a life of regularly spending winter on tour. In fact, I would be chosen to tour with either the full England side or England A every winter from then until I retired 15 years later, although I pulled out of a couple of tours for personal reasons. I still had to wait another two years to play my first Test though, but once I was in the side I was only ever left out for one spell purely on grounds of merit — until the end came in 2005. I’d be taken to some fantastic places and experience some great matches, from Barbados to Brisbane, from Karachi to Colombo. But I was also stepping onto a treadmill. My life had taken a new direction.