On the day of the final, I publicly announced I was giving up one-day cricket. The press release said something about me wanting to spend more time sorting out my private life, which was true, but whatever the outcome this was a permanent decision. The next World Cup was only a few months away but I wasn’t coming back. I was done and dusted with one-day cricket.
I remember standing with Marcus Trescothick on the outfield for the presentation ceremony that evening. In his enlightened state — he’d scored a brilliant hundred that afternoon — he could see that, all right, we’d lost, but it had been a great final, in front of a full house at Lord’s. ‘Thorpey,’ he asked in his Cornish accent, ‘You’re going to give all this up, are you? You don’t want to do this any more? Don’t you think you’ll miss it?’
Maybe that showed how other people can’t see what’s going on inside you. But maybe it also summed up what a poor state I was in; over the years I’d had so much enjoyment out of cricket, the winning, the losing, the camaraderie, but now I just couldn’t see the point. I could no longer feel a thing.
‘Tres, mate,’ I replied, ‘I couldn’t give a fuck.’
But if I thought retiring from one-day cricket would help keep me together, I didn’t know how low I’d become. All I could see was pain and heartache. Sport could not provide me with an escape any longer. Walking away altogether was going to be pretty embarrassing but, by the later stages of the Lord’s Test match against India, which came just two weeks after that one-day final, that was my over-riding desire. I just didn’t want to be in the spotlight any more. I’d been an England cricketer for nine years and now it was enough.
All sorts of things were buzzing through my head but, increasingly, I was having these fantasies. ‘I’m going to leave the country. I’ll go to America and start a new life.’ I found it hard to imagine still living in England. And I think I would have left but for the fact it would obviously have made seeing Henry and Amelia all the more harder, if not impossible. And, crazy though it sounds, I hadn’t given up on Nicky having me back.
FOUR I Don’t Like Cricket, I Hate It
THINGS DIDN’T get better after the Lord’s Test against India in July 2002, they got worse. Much worse. In my new state of ‘retirement’, I found myself with even more time to spend in the family home near Epsom Town, a bloody great pile with five bedrooms and a big garden in the middle of nowhere and just me rattling around inside, me and my tortured thoughts. It might have been an expensive house in a desirable area, but it felt to me like an open prison. I started referring to the house as Colditz.
Nicky and I had bought it in the summer of 2001 intending it to be our dream home, but that idea soon became a sick joke. Many bad things happened in that house as it became the central battleground between the two of us after Nicky announced she wanted a separation. It may be an exaggeration to say that that house ruined everything for us, but it seemed that everything took a turn for the worse after we left our previous house in Ewell.
When I went to Zimbabwe in 2001, it was the first time Nicky had been alone in the new house for any length of time and she didn’t like it. I can remember once speaking to her on the phone from Zimbabwe and she said something about how Kieron — who’d just split up from his girlfriend, as it happened — had come over because she was scared of being in the house on her own. Of course, at that point I’d not twigged what was going on, but that house had helped bring them together.
My god, that house. I hate to think about it. This was the house from which Nicky practically tried to exclude me after she first said she wanted to separate. She rarely wanted me in the house at the same time as her, so we alternated periods of staying there, taking it in turns to look after the children, and when I was the one meant to stay away — which was a lot of the time — I was at a loss as to what to do.
This went on for most of the month I was at home between the Zimbabwe and India tours, and I found myself virtually homeless. There were not that many people I felt I could turn to. I knew it was a situation that only myself and Nicky could really sort out. I spent some time at my parents’ house and also with Alistair Brown. Basically, I was living out of my car. I carried around with me two or three bags of clothes, sometimes washing them at home, sometimes at my parents and sometimes Alistair’s wife Sarah was doing a bit of washing for me. It was a pathetic existence, but I guess it’s not that uncommon when you separate.
I spent god knows how many hours just driving around, without knowing where I was going. I can remember once being behind the wheel, thinking, ‘Where in fuck’s name are you driving? You can’t go back to your house because Nicky’s there. You can’t go to your parents’ house because they’re probably not in … You’ve got nothing to fall back on. Nothing. What are you going to do?’ Occasionally, I’d go and see a couple of mates, mates who’ve since said to me, ‘Christ, you were a mess at that stage. Totally lost.’
Then, one night during this period, I’d been over at a friend’s house, where I think I’d been drinking, and I was on my way back to Brownie’s house. But between these two places was my house, and all of a sudden I was doing the thing you should never do and slowing up outside to have a look, seeing what’s going on. It was around lam and, sure enough, there was Kieron’s car parked in my drive. I’m thinking to myself, ‘I only bought this house two months ago and now I’m in my car outside looking in and there’s this bloke inside …’
My first thought was to do his car over. But then I thought, ‘No. Christ. Criminal damage.’ So I got out of my car, walked up to the house and rang the door bell. God knows what I was planning on doing or saying, but I was in a dream-like state, and it felt like I had no control. Eventually, Nicky opened it.
‘Right,’ I announced. ‘I want to come in, thanks very much. This is my house. I’m coming in.’ Nicky said, ‘Fuck off,’ as I suppose you would at that time of night. I ignored her. ‘This is my house,’ I said. ‘I’ve bought it with my hard-earned money. I’m going to spend the night here, thanks very much.’ Looking back, I was almost in an hysterical state.
At this point Kieron came down the stairs drawling in his South African accent, ‘Nah, let ‘im in.’ Well, I’m thinking to myself, you’re hardly going to say anything else, are you, given that you are actually in my house. I walked in. I was struggling to control myself, but even in my highly agitated state I was aware that the children were asleep upstairs. Probably in an attempt to calm me down, Nicky suggested we talk about things and we all trooped through to the kitchen. It was completely surreal. Unsurprisingly the discussion went nowhere and we quickly ended up just shouting at each other. Then I turned on Kieron, this bloke I’d entertained in my home with his girlfriend at various times over the previous year, and who was now carrying on as though he owned the place, and told him to get out. Nicky said he couldn’t go because he had been drinking. So I started screaming: ‘He’s fucking getting out of here! Get him out of here! Now!’ I think Nicky could see I was in a desperate state and eventually she told him to leave. Suddenly I felt completely drained, exhausted. I started to feel sick and weak and stumbled off to the spare room. I still have no idea why I went there that night, and what I hoped to achieve, but driving by and seeing Kieron’s car outside just made something inside me snap.
What hurt most, I think, was that I felt totally betrayed by the people close to me. The month before we bought the new house, I had given Nicky a new car. It became pretty clear that she had worked out precisely when was financially the most advantageous time to leave. As it turned out, Nicky left me just as the last cheque from my benefit year had cleared.
My