In the end, I moved out of the house and went to stay with Alistair Brown, who lived nearby. I’d known Ally since we were 13. He was then a confident lad who bowled big leg-breaks and had a talent for hitting the ball out of the park, testimony to some of the quickest hands and eyes in the game. Although slightly suspect against the fastest bowling, I think he might have sorted this out had he been exposed to Test cricket, and he was without doubt one of the best batsmen I ever played with at Surrey. We’d joined the county staff at the same time.
I stayed with him for about three weeks before I went back to staggering on with my cricket. To be honest I didn’t really know what else to do and, as my dad said, I needed to keep working because someone was going to have to pay the legal bills if Nicky and I did divorce. Little did I know how many bills, but it was good advice. I decided to go back out to India for the remainder of the tour. I gave a press conference when I got there because it seemed like the best way to deal with the loads of questions the reporters wanted to ask. Hopefully I’d get all that straight out the way. I recall someone asking me whether I accepted that my marriage was over. I said ‘Yes’, but don’t think I really meant it.
I made a conscious effort to appear happier, but behind the scenes was not making the necessary sacrifices to get my game back to where it should have been. I was still drinking and smoking and not training. I’d missed the last two Tests by returning home and we were now involved in a series of six one-day internationals, which was even more physically demanding. I remember a game in Kanpur in which I held the innings together with an unbeaten 36, and felt good that I’d contributed something.
We tied an exciting series 3–3 but, despite my efforts, my heart wasn’t in it which was disappointing because India’s like no other place to play cricket. You’re on a level with movie stars, mobbed by thousands of fans, and that’s just going to a net session. But there had been too many sad moments earlier in the tour for me to enjoy it.
When we moved on to New Zealand I tried even harder to pick myself up by socializing more. What I was actually doing, though, was running away from my situation. I got it into my head that I had to enjoy myself, and I was determined to make the most of every day. It turned into quite a boozy trip. For me there was certainly more drinking on that tour than on any other I’d been on, but I did briefly train hard.
I HAD A BAD EXPERIENCE during the one-day series at the beginning of that 2002 tour, and it brought me face to face with the pain of my position and reminded me that escape was not that easy. A group of New Zealand supporters had formed themselves along the lines of England’s ‘Barmy Army’, called ‘Beige Thirteen’, and they could be relied on to give the opposition plenty of stick. In the second match in Wellington, they singled me out for treatment, sledging me mercilessly while I was fielding on the boundary. This was where the tennis jokes started. They shouted out stuff like, ‘15-love!’, or ‘Vorster’s shagging your wife!’, or ‘Who’s feeding your kids?’
I remember coming off the pitch and Nasser saying to me, ‘What was that all about? What was that bloke with the megaphone shouting?’
‘Mate, did you not hear them?’ I said, incredulous. ‘They were going on about my wife, yelling, “15-love!”. You must have heard them.’
‘Oh mate, sorry. You should have told me. I’d have moved you.’
‘Well, it’s too bloody late now.’
It was an appalling experience and cut me up badly.
Once the first-class programme began, I got off to a terrible start in the first warm-up, a horribly windy match in Queenstown, but was happy to miss the next game and just practice in the nets the day before the first Test. For some reason, maybe because I wasn’t having so much contact with Nicky now, I was more focused than I’d been since my life started going out of control.
One of the problems I’d had in India was that I’d started to question my ability as a cricketer. Could I, this bloke whose wife had left him, still perform on the big stage? I struggled to picture myself scoring another century for England but, somehow, in the first Test in Christchurch, miraculously it happened. Everything just went for me. The wicket, earlier in the game a green seamer on which both sides were bowled out cheaply, had calmed down by the time we batted again, and Chris Cairns had injured his knee and could not bowl.
I went out to bat early on the third day with the bowlers fresh, and was dropped in the slips second ball by Nathan Astle. My second bit of good luck was batting with Freddie Flintoff, a good distraction. Fred was then the side’s promising young all-rounder but he was without a score for a long time, and was getting a lot of stick. I thought he just needed to understand what was required to achieve at the top level.
I liked him and wanted him to do well because he was a big spirit in the dressing-room. I’d played alongside him for England on and off for three years, and had tried to give him advice a few times, but maybe he just hadn’t been ready to listen. Now, I just kept telling him to play his natural game but keep a tight defence to the good balls. Meanwhile, I played quite aggressively at the other end. That we’d gone out the night before, playing pool and drinking Guinness — five or six pints in my case — in the Irish bar across the road from the team hotel, boosted our comradeship. It was an incredible partnership to be involved in, and I was thrilled when Fred got his maiden Test hundred.
In the state of mind I was then in, I didn’t give a great deal of thought to what I was doing. I just went for everything pitched outside off stump. One of the square boundaries was quite short — I used my nous as much as I could and took it on. Fred and I dealt in boundaries, basically. I hit 18 fours in my hundred and Fred had 21 in his. Later on, I hit five sixes — not something that often happened! I gave a bloke called Chris Drum a fearful beating and Fred got stuck into Ian Butler, who was making his Test debut. There was a period when we were charging along at more than ten an over!
A cold shiver went through me when I reached my hundred. I felt proud that I’d managed to score a century again for England, but still didn’t want to take my helmet off to acknowledge the crowd. It was strange, but I didn’t want people to see my face. I felt as though I’d shown people I was trying to climb back up again, but I knew I still didn’t have a grip on things. That innings was pure escapism, and one of the reasons things went so well was that I didn’t want it to end. Being out in the middle, batting was so much better than sitting in the dressing-room thinking about my problems. We declared when I got to 200. It felt like a big achievement -1 didn’t find out until later that it was the second-fastest double-century ever scored for England — but even as I was walking off I was thinking what I was going to say to the press. I wanted to dedicate those two hundreds to my children, Henry and Amelia, which is what I did. Despite an even faster double-century from Astle himself, we won the game on St Patrick’s Day and some of us — especially me, Fred and Butch — took it as a cue to celebrate for two or three days.
To the outsider, it certainly gave the impression that I was okay; perhaps it even convinced me for a time. But had Astle clung onto that chance, my contribution to the winter tours would have been nothing special. Not that I gloated at his dropping me. In the 1996 World Cup, I cost us our opening fixture against New Zealand in Ahmedabad (as you can imagine, not my favourite city in the world) by putting him down early on in his century. I’d also once dropped Matthew Elliott in an Ashes Test at Leeds before he reached 30, and he went on to make nearly 200, so I knew all about the humiliation of standing in the field watching a bloke who should be back in the pavilion enjoying himself at your expense.
The euphoria was short-lived. The next day, Nicky dropped another bombshell and did something she’d always said she’d never do. She did a spread in the Sunday Mirror saying, ‘He’s no hero, he’s a serial cheat.’ My brother Alan read it to me over the phone. This was the first newspaper article done by either of us about our private life and it devastated me. It was something she’d said she would never do. It was clear to me that the sole intention of the piece was to portray me in a bad light and in order to do that had fabricated many incidents. It was so unfair,