To make matters worse, I was given out caught behind off Daryl Tuffey by local umpire Doug Cowie, even though the only contact was bat brushing pad. It was my own fault. At one point the previous night, we’d gathered round the umpires in an attempt to persuade them that whatever the regulations stated it was simply too dark for us to field. I’d rather unwisely overstepped the mark in my arm-twisting. And earlier in the game I’d been at the non-striker’s end when Cowie had given out Flintoff caught behind, even though his bat was inches away from the ball; I could see the gap from where I was standing, and was amazed Cowie hadn’t seen it as well. Now, I said to him, ‘Look Doug, you had problems seeing it in daylight, let alone late at night …’ It raised a smile from Fred, but Cowie wasn’t impressed. ‘There’s no need for that,’ he said sternly.
I don’t know whether it influenced his decision the next day but, on reflection, I realized I’d given him an opportunity to exercise a bit of revenge and it might have been much better if I’d kept my mouth shut. He might have given me the benefit of the doubt.
UMPIRES CAN HOLD GRUDGES. Early in my career, Surrey were not a popular side and at times we pushed things to the limit with our gamesmanship. We faced accusations of excessive appealing and, in the 1991 season, ball tampering. Some officials seemed to think of us as ‘city slickers’ who needed taking down a peg. In the end, we realized that the only way to change things for the better was to clean up our act, which we did. But I remember, during an early season game against Durham, showing my displeasure at Don Oslear giving me out lbw to Ian Botham, then in the twilight of his great career. I glowered at Oslear as I trudged away, so slowly that Botham shouted at me to get off the field, sharpish. In later years I became firm friends with ‘Beefy’, but back then to him I was just another whippersnapper.
After play, I was summoned to the umpires’ room where Oslear warned me that I was heading up a few cul-de-sacs in life if I thought I was never out. I was unrepentant and pretty outspoken. I knew he didn’t like Surrey because he had accused us of ball-tampering the previous season. I told him that I thought England’s best all-rounder had got him under his thumb. As it happened, he didn’t spend much more time on the umpiring list, but needless to say Don didn’t do me too many favours thereafter. It was clearly a lesson I’d forgotten, come Auckland 2002. It pretty much summed up my life at that stage. My luck was out.
I got back to England in early April. I took a taxi from the airport to the house, opened the front door, dropped my bags on the floor and looked around at what was now a deserted home. I’d paid Nicky enough money to buy a four-bedroom house, and Kieron had moved in with her. Here, now, for the first time, I was confronted with the full awfulness of my situation. What I saw was a sight I’d been trying to avoid thinking about.
I’d come home to a silent house with no children. Nicky had left me just one bed, one TV, an old two-piece sofa and, I soon discovered, a broken central heating system. I sat at the foot of the stairs, feeling utterly devastated, and I cried. I’d finally run out of distractions.
From this point, I became increasingly incapable of compartmentalizing my life, keeping my private problems separate from my cricket. I just couldn’t do it. Sometimes I’d think I could cope, but then something would drag me back down. It was like trying to climb a mountain of ice, with nothing to cling on to. Occasionally I’d get so far up and then, bam, back down again.
I tried to motivate myself in my cricket by saying, ‘Come on, do it for the children’, but then I’d hear or see something, maybe children walking down the road who were a similar age to Henry and Amelia, and all of a sudden tears would well up. ‘Fucking hell, get me out of here.’ So I’d have another beer, another smoke. ‘What’s happening to me?’
I was starting to realize that I was doing myself damage and that this wasn’t a way out. I was becoming seriously unfit, short of sleep and my mind was all over the place. The way I was carrying on was just a way of escape, and even then it only lasted a few hours at a time. I had to deal with it but I didn’t know how.
I did play one more big innings, though, before that India Test at Lord’s, and it was another of those times during this period when finding a partner to bat with — Matthew Hoggard, our No 11, in the second Test against Sri Lanka at Edgbaston in June — took my mind off things, and briefly enabled me to function again. Once I got a feel for an innings and a situation, I could still do it, but it was very sporadic.
We were well in control by the time I went out to bat late on the second day. Inspired by some high-quality bowling from Andrew Caddick, we’d bowled out Sri Lanka for 162 and a big stand from Trescothick and Butcher had helped push us to 176 in front when I went out to bat. It was another of those times when it would have been easy to give it away, but the pitch was quiet and we wanted a big lead otherwise it was quite possible Sri Lanka would bat their way out of trouble. A steady trickle of wickets at the other end helped concentrate my mind and, when Hoggard walked out with a bat in his hand not long before lunch the next day, I was still there, on 61, having seen six partners depart.
A lot was in our favour — Muttiah Muralitharan, Sri Lanka’s match-winning bowler, was not fully fit — but it was still an amazing partnership. So much went as planned. I think Hoggie and I stayed together for 30 overs, and we controlled the strike so well that in all but one over I was on strike for the first ball. It really demoralized the fielders. Not that Hoggie was a mug with the bat; as he was quick to tell everyone, a couple of years after this he almost scored a century for Yorkshire as night-watchman. His talent was just keeping things simple: blocking, leaving, trying nothing fancy. By the end, I was happy to let him face most of the over, and overall I think he took slightly more of the strike than I did during our partnership.
We had some fun setting ourselves targets, 10 runs at a time, his score, my score, our partnership. By talking us through things, I managed to keep us focused. In the end, I was out first, cutting high to third man, but by that point I’d got 123 and was pretty happy with what we’d achieved. We’d built up a lead of almost 400, and it was enough to set up a commanding win.
It was great to escape the reality of my personal situation for as many hours as I could manage on the pitch. It’s funny, but I found myself relaxed and feeling more in control during that innings than I had felt for weeks off the pitch. My mind had been doing strange things to me. I was in increasingly bad shape, physically and mentally. I began to question the point of my playing cricket. When men went out to work, they did it for their families, and that became their motivation. I didn’t want to play just for myself. I thought, ‘Yeah, well, you may have just got a Test hundred against Sri Lanka, but did it really give you a lift?’ And the answer was, ‘No it didn’t.’ As soon as the applause stopped and I came off the field, I felt empty inside. I needed the happiness of a family to go back home to if my cricket was to have a purpose. I was desperately missing my children.
My condition wasn’t helped by an incident before the next Test against Sri Lanka, at Old Trafford, when I tripped over Michael Vaughan. We were playing a warm-up game of football and I badly hurt my ankle. I still played in the Test but there was a lot of bruising, and I wasn’t fit going into the triangular one-day series that preceded the Tests with India. I only played a few times, missing an epic final against India when we scored a massive 325 but