Since Graham Thorpe abruptly disappeared from public view more than two years ago, I, and I am sure many others had tried to locate him. Every month or so I would key his name into Google and hope for a scintilla of information from somewhere. Something, anything to indicate what the problem was or to evidence that he was on the road to recovery.
Yet the clock seemed to stop around an unprescribed illness in May 2022 and never moved forward. Weirdly, and perhaps now understandably, there was never anything more than that. Not even the typical unfounded and salacious type of details made up by malicious malcontents in their parents’ basement.
It was strange for someone in the 21st-century internet and social media age to simply disappear and for the silence to never be corrupted. Maybe it was because Thorpe was merely well-known and not famous. In England these days, there is a difference between ‘cricket-famous’ and actual famous.
Freddie Flintoff is the latter, KP too to an extent, as are old-timers like Botham and Gower – but Thorpe didn’t quite have it, not that I am sure he would actually have wanted whatever ‘it’ is anyway. Outside of the gradually shrinking world of English cricket fandom, most people would be completely unaware of him. More Cricket Years ago, an English tabloid newspaper completely pulled Thorpe’s personal life apart in a horrible hatchet job of an article.
It made the front page and picked vulture-like at the carcass of his failing fir.