One of the special things about Lord’s Tests, of course, is the social side. Spectators take picnic hampers, and you always know when the lunch interval is approaching because the stands start emptying as people slip off for lunch. And many aren’t in too much of a rush to get back promptly for the re-start.
Well, there must have been a few who missed my innings. I was down to bat at No 4 and not 5, where I’d been batting the previous few months, because Marcus Trescothick had been ruled out with an injury and we’d rejigged the batting order. As it happened, the second wicket fell only minutes before lunch, leaving me to negotiate a tricky little period. No time to get myself in, but plenty of time to get out. Fortunately, Anil Kumble served up a full toss first ball which even I couldn’t fail to put away to the boundary. But he beat me the following ball and, in the next over, the last before the interval, Zaheer Khan went past my bat too.
Zaheer is a lively and intelligent left-arm swing bowler, and I wasn’t surprised to see him preparing to continue when Nasser and I walked out for the afternoon session. Nasser played out the first over to put me back on strike at the Nursery End against Zaheer. Because of the slope running across the square, batting at Lord’s is all about getting used to two totally different ends. As a left-hander, I don’t mind the Pavilion End and can get into better positions there, but I have to fight not to fall over and lose my sideways position at the Nursery End, where the movement of the ball angled across you is accentuated by the drop.
Zaheer was right on target, bowling me a really good sequence of balls. He probably should have saved it for someone else, but then he didn’t know he wasn’t bowling to Graham Thorpe but his shadow. He beat me once, angled a couple into me that I had to play, before giving me one that pitched middle and leg and left me. I didn’t spot the movement, didn’t move my feet, and played down the wrong line. Then came the clatter of stumps.
I walked back to the dressing-room, unstrapped my pads and slumped into the big chair on the left of the window, opposite Freddie Flintoff, and threw down my kit. I had chosen that chair in the hope that it would bring me a change of luck. This was my tenth Test match at Lord’s, but I’d never scored a century, never got my name up on the honours board, and I’d been in the habit of moving seats in the hope it would alter my fortune. Maybe the missing hundred had something to do with the slope, but I think it was just one of those things. In the past, I’d revelled in the atmosphere and crowds at Lord’s, and certainly not everything there was against batting. The outfield was usually fast, so the ball raced away, and though I’d once been whacked over the temple by a ball from Courtney Walsh that I’d lost in the trees above the sightscreen at the Nursery End, having to spend a night in hospital, I’d returned to score 40. The last time I’d played India there, in 1996, I was confident of making a century until I got an inside edge off Javagal Srinath on 89. And now, surprise, surprise, despite the switching of chairs, my luck was still out.
I’d been smoking pretty steadily for some months by then, so I took my packet of cigarettes out of my bag and smoked two or three straight off. Mark Butcher said later that he remembered me for much of that match just sitting there in that chair, every lunch break, every tea break. All I remember thinking was, ‘Do I have to get back out there?’ Those sessions seemed like the longest and slowest I’d known.
The end of each day’s play came as huge relief, except that the relief quickly gave way to anxiety. In the back of my mind I’d be calculating that I’d got five or six hours of being awake — awake and totally miserable, before, if lucky, getting off to sleep. And sleep was hard to get. The anti-depressants hadn’t improved things, and I reckon I probably got only three or four hours of sleep a night during that match. I’d get up at 3am, feeling down, and light another cigarette. And I kept thinking, ‘I don’t want to be doing this. I can’t keep fucking doing this. This is killing me.’
I just couldn’t find any strength. I wished there was a magic switch I could flick to wipe away my entire memory-bank so I could just get back to living a normal life. But there wasn’t. If I was lucky I might drift off to sleep again for 30 minutes or an hour. Then I’d be up again thinking, ‘Now I’ve got to go out and play again.’
If batting was bad, fielding was worse, and there was a good reason for that. Not only had my wife left me, she’d left me for someone who was also in the public eye. He was Kieron Vorster, who was Tim Henman’s fitness trainer at the time. Naturally this made the whole affair that much juicier to the papers, and there’d be no shortage of wags in the crowd with a few beers inside them ready to crack tennis jokes when I retrieved the ball from the boundary. Sure enough, the wisecracks started when we fielded, but I wasn’t strong enough to take them. ‘Bitch …’ [that was often my first reaction] ‘… for doing this to me.’
There were many times when I just wanted to walk off. I’d go onto the field, look up at the clock and think, ‘A two-hour session. Two hours.’ Then I’d look again. One hour, 50 minutes. I just wanted the next break now, to get off. I think I stood at first slip next to Alec Stewart quite a lot of the time and prattled on about things off the field, as you do. I’d played more cricket with Stewie than perhaps anybody. He’d been on the Surrey staff when I’d joined 14 years earlier, and we’d changed next to each other in the dressing-room for most of that time. We were chalk and cheese in some respects. He was good at concealing his emotions and if something had been going wrong for him off the field, as with me now, you’d probably not have noticed. He would have been his usual professional self.
I remember finding it really difficult to encourage the bowlers; I probably did it occasionally because I felt I had to. In fact I hardly touched the ball, but I did have a chance early on to catch Sachin Tendulkar which I put down. Brilliant. ‘I’ve only gone and put down the world’s leading batsman. I don’t think I can do this again. I can’t play for England again.’ Some of the lads knew something was badly wrong, but no-one said anything.
On the second night of the game I reckon I got off to sleep about midnight, maybe lam, and was up again by about 3 or 4am, having woken sweating like a proverbial pig. I often did around then. The drinking was making me a bag of nerves. Maybe three or four beers or a bottle of wine and I’d wake up in the night, sober, in a cold sweat, my mind jumping. And I wasn’t looking forward to the cricket at all. I told myself to try and find something positive to latch onto but there was nothing, just that clock ticking round, the lunch and tea breaks and the moment I could get off the pitch. I must have been tired by then. Really, really tired.
On the third day, the Saturday, a solicitor and barrister came to see me. It was a completely surreal experience. Here I was playing a Test match for England at the greatest venue in the world, being interrogated in a lunch break about my finances. It was perhaps an indication of my state of mind at the time. I should never have let it happen, and it showed how easily manipulated I was at that time. I was so racked with guilt over my marriage break-up that I was always trying to accommodate people, and show what a decent bloke I could be.
We went through my whole financial situation, how much a settlement was likely to cost, how much Nicky was likely to get, and in the back of my mind I’m thinking, ‘You’re discussing my future earnings, discussing my next year’s salary and what maintenance I’m going to pay, and I’m not even sure I’ll be earning a penny then’ I had an England contract but they were renewed — or not — each September, and I wasn’t certain I was going to be in England’s thinking in one week’s time, let alone two months.
After tea, I batted again. We were already well ahead and preparing to set India a big target. We were 60-odd for two when I joined Michael Vaughan, who was already playing well and on course for a century — he was then in the early stages of a golden run that lasted for the next 12 months. It was after tea, and there was still a while to go until stumps. Even if I’d been in a great state of mind it was the kind of situation I’d have found awkward. I was rarely great when the match didn’t demand much of me. I preferred it when we had our backs to the wall — but now that only applied to my private life.
I remember walking out to bat