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