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.
IF YOU ARE going to have a career in professional sport you have to accept you’re going to have a public profile. There’s no escape. But I always disliked publicity. I didn’t want it, and I didn’t need it. I was reluctant to accept I was public property, and for years my way of dealing with the public side was to pretty much ignore it. As a kid, I’d admired Ian Botham and Viv Richards, but I have always known I wasn’t a showman like either of them, or like Darren Gough or Kevin Pietersen. I wasn’t the least bit outgoing.
In fact it took me a while to be confident enough to speak up in England team meetings — perhaps one reason I wasn’t a natural captain — and knew there was no point trying to be what I wasn’t. As Alec Stewart once said, ‘Thorpey will decide whether he’ll get to know you or not.’ I liked to think of this as a strength. I played up to the dour image; like Steve Waugh, I didn’t see why I should give much away on the field. I had little time for show because I preferred to see things as they were. Perhaps because I’d had to make my own way in the game, I sought no excuses. If I failed, it was because I’d played a poor shot; if I succeeded it was because I’d played well. I don’t think at any stage I thought, ‘I’ve cracked it’. There was always another hurdle to clear. When I was growing up, I’d sometimes fantasise about succeeding as a sportsman but I always reminded myself of the work required to make it happen. And I knew if I scored a century there was every chance I might be out for nought next time, so I was careful not to have big expectations or make rash predictions. I was always suspicious of media hype.
During my separation and divorce, I hated my private life being splashed all over the papers but came to learn there was not much I could do about it. Not many people can handle reporters pushing their cards through their letter-box offering money to tell their story, or photographers lurking in bushes outside their house, and I certainly wasn’t one of them. I wanted to ask them,’ What the fuck’s any of this got to do with you?’ But I came to realize that it had got something to do with them. I was an England cricketer and, more importantly, my wife had just sold a tabloid story on me. Of course the papers were going to be interested. I was a story, like it or not, and was going to remain one as long as I remained an England cricketer.
In my early days, I thought life was great when I played well and read all the complimentary things written about me, but when things went badly I took care not to pick up the papers. Back then, I’d want to shut the door on the bad things and forget them. This pretty much typified my character during my mid-twenties. It was pride. Avoiding criticism was actually quite a good mechanism for maintaining the self-belief you needed to perform well, but I was ducking the reality of my position. It took me a long time to realize that there were people in the media prepared to tear you down.
Looking back, I can see how naive I was. I was a shy, quietly confident lad who just wanted to play his cricket. When the press first started taking an interest in me, I didn’t have the skill to deal with them in a confident manner. There was no media training in those days. Before my first game for England against Australia in 1993,1 was just thrown out to do press interviews after nets. It was like, ‘Now, can you just be interviewed by that lot over there?’ The press seemed to know more about me than I did. It wasn’t in my nature to talk up my ambitions. I reckoned I’d only make problems for myself.
But everything changes when you enter international cricket. Before that, you’ve just played seasons of county cricket usually watched by a few hundred spectators when the pressure was relatively tiny.
Just the occasional one-day county match was shown on TV, but these matches did have an impact. They were good tests of character, being regarded by selectors and players as especially important. You found that some people performed and others didn’t. I tended to do well. In 1991,1 scored 91 in the Nat West Trophy final against Hampshire and just before I was chosen for England, I played in a televised Benson and Hedges Cup match against Lancashire — an amazing game which we lost after our last nine wickets fell for 18 runs — and scored 103. Although I was partly responsible for the collapse by getting out when I did, that innings helped my cause because I’d showed an appetite for the big stage by scoring runs against a strong attack including Wasim Akram and Phil DeFreitas.
Although I never craved attention, I certainly enjoyed the thrill of doing well when the stakes were high. That was not a concern. I wanted to test myself, and the toughest environment meant TV cameras and large crowds. You might think everyone feels like that but they don’t. I think it was one of the reasons Graeme Hick didn’t do as well as he should have done in Test cricket. He wasn’t the kind of bloke who was comfortable with public expectation, and in his case there was plenty of it. It just wasn’t in his nature. I could accept it because, as far as I was concerned, it was a test of me as a cricketer; what I didn’t like was when the focus shifted onto me as a person. Doing well in those circumstances was an incredible feeling, a feeling which I know I’ll never get again outside cricket.
In the Test arena, the pressure is intense and everything you do is subject to scrutiny from armies of TV, radio and newspaper pundits. When you are out, your dismissal is up on the big screen for everyone to study. It was difficult adjusting to all this, and I certainly wasn’t at ease with the goldfish-bowl existence. Suddenly, everybody knows your job, and when you’ve had a good or bad day. You have to learn to handle everything that goes with the successes and failures if you want to survive. What I realized towards the end of my career was that the nearer you got to retirement the greater the debate about your right to be still in the team.
Try as you might to escape hearing criticism, you can’t block off everything. You only have to bump into a mate and he’ll pass on an opinion some commentator has given on how you played. You say, ‘Oh really?’ while inside you didn’t want to hear it. Or some punter who days earlier had congratulated you turns round in a hotel lift and says, ‘That wasn’t a great shot you played today.’ Yeah, thanks. It pays to develop a thick skin.
I remember before my first A-tour going