‘No, nothing,’ I lied. ‘I’m all right.’ But I told him soon enough about how Nicky had asked for a separation a few weeks previously. Nasser and I had known each other a long time. We had first come across each other in county schools matches, and since then had played a lot of cricket together for England for almost 10 years. Our views on a lot of things were similar. We’d spoken about the strain professional cricket puts on relationships, and agreed we didn’t want to play just for our marriages to go down the drain, so I knew he was someone who’d understand better than most. When he asked me what I thought about the whole thing, I told him I honestly didn’t know. I admitted I was wondering whether I should go back home or not. In the end I stayed but sat out a couple of matches, and in the ones I did play in I was terrible.
Once my situation became general knowledge among the squad, Ben Hollioake, one of my closest friends in the Surrey team, was a big help. He regularly came knocking on my door to check I was all right in the evenings, and would persuade me to go out and eat with him. He was always trying to distract me and was so understanding, amazing for someone who was only 21. I think he was pretty shocked. He’d viewed Nicky and I as a stable couple.
In normal circumstances, given that I’d got a young family, I would probably have been one of the guys who’d have questioned whether I should have gone on the Test tour of India about a month later, because there were security fears following the September 11 terrorist attacks. If we’d been happy together I’m sure Nicky would have told me I shouldn’t go, but not now. It was, ‘Go on, you’ve got to get on that plane.’
THE WARM-UP GAMES in India were a real struggle. I played in the first one in Hyderabad but scored few runs and sat out the second in Jaipur, even though I could have done with the practice. The original plan was for me to play but I pulled out. I was so depressed that I struggled to get out of bed and phoned Dean Conway, our physiotherapist, to tell him I wasn’t sleeping and couldn’t play. This was one of the hardest periods I went through. I wanted to go onto antidepressants but Dean wouldn’t let me, and told me to cheer myself up by getting into the gym. I managed it once but came away utterly exhausted and defeated.
The time difference was awful, my sleep pattern was awful and my fitness was awful, and all that in a country where the heat was stifling. I was on Sudafed to keep me awake during the day, and on sleeping tablets to drive away the demons at night. Two sleeping tablets occasionally got me through from midnight to 6am, but often I woke much earlier. Nicky wouldn’t speak to me until the children were in bed, and that was 3am in India. Sometimes that’d be when I was waking. I often spoke to her for about an hour. I was still trying to get her back. She just wouldn’t give ground but I thought I could persuade her. I would often end up in tears, begging, pleading.
My routine, such as it was, was to try and practice — and stay awake — during the day, and in the evening spend a couple of hours with Ashley Giles and Michael Vaughan on the PlayStation. For me, this was the best part of the day, a couple of mates around me with whom I could try to have a laugh. The worst part was being alone in my room at night, and I began to have a bottle of Scotch to hand. Normally, I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing such a thing, especially in such a humid country. I might have had one or two glasses of wine during the evening but this was madness, drinking and smoking — I’d taken up smoking as well — and generally making myself unhealthy.
By the time of the first Test in Mohali, I was incapable of concentrating properly. We batted first and I found myself facing a swing bowler called Iqbal Siddiqui playing his first Test. He kept drifting the ball away from me. I hadn’t prepared for this type of bowling and, after driving him through the covers a couple of times, was caught off a lazy front-foot drive. Later, as India amassed a big lead, I remember standing in the field, fortunately with sunglasses on, tears in my eyes, wondering what was happening to my life. I also dropped an absolute sitter off Richard Dawson, our spinner. The batter literally lobbed it up to me. Everyone just stood there, looking at me. ‘Shit, shit, shit, shit, SHIT!’
Somehow I batted for about three hours in our second innings, ninth out for a top score of 62, but it was a surreal experience. For the first time I could remember, I was batting for my country and didn’t really care what happened. I knew we were almost certainly going to lose because we’d conceded a huge first innings deficit and India’s spinners, Anil Kumble and Harbhajan Singh, were in their element. As they ran in to bowl to me, I kept thinking about my private life, Nicky and the children, and how long I could cope. I thought ‘Whoops, there’s a Kumble googly. Whoa! … Harbhajan’s other one.’ Sometimes I’d put a straight bat on one and think, ‘How the hell did I do that?’ I wasn’t thinking about footmarks or how much the ball was turning, I was thinking ‘My life’s a mess.’ I was playing from memory.
I had the wicket-keeper chuntering away, and at one stage turned round to him and said, ‘Why don’t you cut it out? I don’t give a shit. I’m probably going to get out any moment. What you say isn’t going to make any difference.’
If anyone had known what was going through my brain they would have packed me off to The Priory, no questions asked. In the end, I chipped a return catch to Kumble and we lost with a day to spare.
TWO NIGHTS before the second Test in Ahmedabad, during another seriously bad phone call to Nicky, I finally realized that she might be in a relationship with Kieron. Perhaps somewhere at the back of my mind I had suspected as much, but if I ever thought about it at all I probably dismissed the idea as ridiculous. A couple of mates of mine had suggested she must be involved with someone else — you don’t just suddenly want to separate for no reason — but I’d just waved it away. The realization that she might be seeing someone, and someone I had once called a friend — because Nicky and I used to socialize with Kieron and his former girlfriend, Laura — sent me into a hurt rage. How could Nicky behave like this in the house we’d bought together only a few months earlier, while I was halfway round the world trying to support her and the children?
I decided I had to go home and try, however hopeless it seemed, to sort things out. I spoke to Nasser and Duncan the night before the game, and neither tried to dissuade me. I think they knew my mind was made up, and that I wasn’t in the habit of being talked out of things.
My decision to abandon the tour failed to achieve anything, and merely succeeded in splashing my problems all over the newspapers. I was met by a television journalist at the airport asking me whether my marriage was on the rocks, and when I got back to my house there were half a dozen reporters camped on the doorstep. The tabloids felt sure there was substance to the rumours now circulating about my marriage because I was returning home early. That morning The Sun had printed a photograph of another man — unnamed in the newspaper but it was Kieron — going into my house with Nicky. How juicy.
I didn’t believe Nicky’s and Kieron’s claims that nothing was going on between them, but told the reporters that Kieron was a family friend to get the reporters off my case. Nicky and I ‘gutsed’ it out living in the same house, arguing in front of the children, Nicky saying she wanted to separate but unsure if she wanted a divorce, me wanting … what did I want? Just to wake up from all this.
Things got worse. About a week after I got back, a girl from Cheshire called Lizette Roberts, who was trying to launch her pop career, claimed in the News of the World that she’d met me after a one-day international in Manchester five years earlier and had had sex with me six times in a night. Of course it wasn’t true, but it made things between Nicky and me all the harder, especially as I’d previously admitted to Nicky my one infidelity in New Zealand back in 1997. I did take advice about suing this woman but was warned against it — something about it being my word against hers.
Everything was out of control. I was someone who’d always wanted my private life to be private; now I was probably the most public cricketer in the land.