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 first marriage and his relationship with his children. At the time, I remember being angered by this because he felt like such an unworthy target. Why would they go after someone who was purely a cricketer with not even the remotest slither of celebrity attached to him? I wonder if that newspaper will be leading the cortege of crocodile-teared farewells today? But now I need not wonder about Thorpe any longer.
Last week the cocoon of silence was cracked with sharp intensity as the news of his death abruptly seeped out from news media. It was permanently shattered today with the revelation that he died by his own hand. The sadness in knowing this, and that he had tried previously, is palpable and hard to wrestle with.
The comments from his wife, Amanda, are enough to break your heart. “He was so unwell in recent times, and he really did believe that we would be better off without him,” she told The Times newspaper. Thorpe had struggled with depression and anxiety, and ultimately the man that was so unruffled at the crease, couldn’t find the shots to bat these twin-ravages away any longer.
Reading that Graham Thorpe took his own life is so desperately sad. Huge credit to his family for talking about it so openly in the hope of raising awareness and understanding in others, that takes tremendous strength. RIP Graham.
❤️ pic.twitter.com/bx92G9eVIM And that’s the thing with Thorpe; the reason why I cared enough to continually seek him out in the shadows of the internet.
For so long, in what was such a dark and abject period for English cricket, he seemed to be the lone player prepared to stand up and take it. He made his runs when they mattered and not when the outfield was like marble and the bowlers little more than obliging servants. Too often in those days, his innings were defiant salvos fired as the ship went down, but they were something for the brow-beaten public to cling onto.
And that is why his final international knock was so unworthy of him. Sixty-six not out against a pathetically poor Bangladesh bowling attack, in an innings victory at the county outpost of Durham was less than his 100-Test career deserved. Graham Thorpe last test innings 2005 RIP legend pic.
twitter.com/bBtW3izCja I’ll always believe that he should have played in the fabled 2005 Ashes, later that summer. History remembers it as a straight-out fight between Thorpe and the then-newcomer Kevin Pietersen, but the reality – in my mind at least – was that Thorpe should have played instead of Ian Bell.
It is easy to make lamentations now with the hindsight of knowing Bell’s less-than-stellar performance with the bat that summer. If there was ever a player for lazy afternoons, it was Bell. He would shine on windless summer days when the attack was frazzled, and the scorecard was serenely positioned at 300 for three.
Thorpe was almost the counter Bell. A player who thrived on the hard moments and was often listless when the going failed to challenge him. I am proud to say that I at least witnessed Thorpe’s penultimate innings in the first Test of that same two-match series at Lords.
He made 42 not out in a game so abysmally one-sided that the touts outside the ground were desperately selling tickets at face value. I bought a bat in the Lord’s shop and passed it around to a huge school party of kids sat behind me to take a closer look at it. I remember that, but not a single ball of Thorpe’s innings.
They were never the kind you remembered with Graham. He only came alive when the situation demanded it. I wonder if any of those kids, wherever they are today, remember it? What was the question again that John Arlott posed of the peerless Jack Hobbs? “They cannot say how many men whose names you never knew are proud to tell their sons they saw you play.
” Ah, that was it. Thorpe might not have been like Hobbs, one of the greatest run-scorers in the history of the game, but he was a very good player when England needed something, anything to hang their hopes upon. Think of that Ashes century [114 not out] on debut in 1993 or the one-boundary ton crafted in seven hours of stifling heat at Lahore.
Better still the 64 not out in near darkness in Karachi that assured the tourists of their first Test series victory in Pakistan in nearly four decades. The almost run-a-ball double ton in New Zealand, or the glorious comeback innings of 124 against South Africa at The Oval after five years in the wilderness. His 6,744 runs at an average of 44.
66 marks him as better than average, good even, but not nearly an all-time great. Yet cricket is all about moments. The single second of inspiration or long hours of application that can change a game.
Graham Thorpe looks on from the the balcony during day 1 of the 1st Npower Test match between England and Bangladesh at Lord’s on May 26, 2005 in London, England. (Photo by Tom Shaw/Getty Images) Thorpe was possessed of classic left-handed style. He could play all the shots, most notably the cover drive and the pull, and had it in him to take the bowlers to the cleaners.
But more often than not he batted within himself, in accordance with what the team needed at that point in time. When they didn’t need him, his thoughts were prone to drift away from the game and, he’d often fade into the peripheral, waiting to be galvanised by the next challenge of technique and application. Like many before him, Graham Thorpe deserved better than to go like that.
To be so polluted by the relentless presence of his illness that he thought he was useless to everyone. Over the years cricket has maintained a grim roll call of death by suicide. From the likes of Edwardian champion A.
E. Stoddart to the frenetic nervous energy and anxiety of Harold Gimblett, and those like Percy Chapman who chose to diligently drink themselves to death instead. First-class and Test cricket with its cold finalities and its long periods of waiting must by nature drive introspection in certain characters.
It is no confidence that deep within cricket’s lore exists its age-old metaphors of life and death. Still, we should not seek to avert our eyes away from Thorpe’s tragic end. To do so would be to dishonour him.
Yet now it is only natural to want to focus on the good times, the YouTube clips of battling success, the ball skidding to the boundary from an imperious drive; those little scoreboard rotating nurdles square of the wicket, that must have driven Moin Khan to distraction back in 2000. Right now, his family mourn him, as do cricketers who played with him or were coached by him. But to a lesser extent so do thousands of people like me who once watched him play.
Those who would have gladly sold our right arm in a Faustian pact to be able to play like him and possess his strength of character at the crease. We never met him, yet still, we admired him and with that, we wished the best for him. It’s just a tragedy that he never realised quite how much.
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