Seeing the children were bitter-sweet times. In happier days, I could obviously take Henry and Amelia out of the house no questions asked, down to the shops, on a bike ride or to the swimming pool, but now all these things had to be painfully negotiated and without the co-operation of Nicky they were next to impossible to make happen. While I was allowed to see the children from time to time, it was not always in the way I wanted. I always felt she was in control.
What I found hardest to comprehend about her attitude was that she wanted to take away the special relationship between me and my children. Fortunately, Amelia was not yet three and perhaps too young to know what she was missing but Henry, at five, was not. I’m sure he must have been desperate for me to watch him play football more often than I could, or for more of our trips down to the driving-range.
Basically I was on my own. I had effectively cut myself off from cricket and soon found that all those people on Nicky’s side, who I had thought were friends, had turned away. I was left to rely heavily on my parents, although that was not easy as there had been a time when I’d not spoken to them for two or three years at the start of my marriage because Nicky hadn’t got on with them. Unbeknown to me, she had written to my parents a few weeks after our wedding saying how awful they were, that they’d spoilt the wedding day — she even called my father a philistine! — and she said she wanted nothing more to do with them. It put me in an impossible situation, and I ended up siding with Nicky which created a rift with my parents, something I really regret now. I was so grateful to find that they were there for me at this time. It was quite a humbling experience.
A few friends in cricket kept in touch, but only a few like Mark Butcher and Ray Alikhan, and I noted those who didn’t. I first met Ray, who had been my best man, in my second season at Surrey. He had joined us from Sussex. He was a few years older and we couldn’t have been more different. He was this elegant, princely figure while I was this terrier-like bloke with no style whatsoever, but we just gelled. He’d summoned me to bowl at him in the nets. ‘Old boy, come over and throw some to me, will you?… Just bowl them nice and short.’ And he just kept pulling me away for miles. We sometimes trained together and, when he was let go by Surrey a few years later, we carried on training and playing squash together. He said that I had helped him then, and I was grateful for his support now.
Butch and I went back a long way. I first remember him as an 18-year-old with a big hairdo, strolling out at No 9 to join me in a Sunday league match at the Oval and almost pulling off an amazing victory by smashing a quick 40-odd. He was three years younger than me and saw me, he once said, as something of a role model, but the respect was always mutual. As fellow lefthanders, I suppose we had a natural affinity. Socially, we weren’t that close to start with. I kept myself to myself in those days, and was notorious for being unable to remember people’s names. I was pretty wrapped up in my cricket and spent an unhealthy amount of time thinking about it. Butch always had a better perspective on things and thought nothing of a night out. I came to realize that it wasn’t a bad thing to chill out now and again, and by the end I reckoned I was as close to Butch as to anybody I’d known in cricket.
There were, though, times when outside circumstances put our friendship under strain. Our wives — Butch was married to Alec Stewart’s sister Judy — did not hit it off (but then come to think of it, on looking back, Nicky didn’t hit it off with many people). That made things difficult for a while, and we also had a period of a few months when we didn’t speak after Butch was named stand-in England captain ahead of me during the home series with New Zealand in 1999.
That was a complicated situation. I was going through a bad patch with the England management, which ought to have made it no surprise that they chose someone else, but I was annoyed because in the previous game at Lord’s, when Nasser had left injured, he put me in charge. When Nasser was ruled out of the next Test in Manchester, the selectors opted to give the captaincy to Butch. Given that the two ex-captains in the side, Atherton and Stewart, were reluctant to lead again, I was the senior available pro. There was really no reason to hold anything against Butch — it wasn’t his fault he was chosen — but I behaved in a pretty shitty way throughout the Test at Old Trafford. I should have accepted the situation but didn’t and my attitude was poor. All in all, I behaved pretty childishly, in retrospect.
Butch was having his own problems at that time which plunged his life into the sort of crisis mine was now in. His marriage to Judy was breaking down. Like me, he started to drink more and his game began to collapse under the strain. I wasn’t on the 1999–2000 tour of South Africa when his struggles really began, but well remember one day the next spring him throwing his bat down during a net session at the Oval, and slumping onto the ground in tears. We hadn’t spoken for a long time but I went up to him and asked him if he was all right and he told me what had happened. The time to mend bridges was long overdue. I told him that I was sorry there had been problems between us and said that if there was anything I could do to help him I would gladly do it.
It was an important day in our relationship, and after that we grew a lot closer. He lost his England place for a year but came back strongly against Australia in 2001 and established himself as the side’s No 3. So, when my problems started, Butch recognized the situation straightaway and gave me encouragement and advice. But there was only so much others could do. When I did occasionally go out socializing I wasn’t really there. I was still low and lost in my thoughts.
God knows how many days I spent in that house, staring at the walls, each numbing day indistinguishable from the next. The soul-searching now began in earnest. What exactly was I going to do? As Duncan Fletcher had said, I had to do something, but I ended up doing very little except getting wasted on my own every night. Each night I might drink three or four glasses of wine, though perhaps once a week it might be a bottle of Jack Daniels instead. It was the booze that really affected me. It would make me wake up in the night with my mind buzzing.
I was trying to come to terms with what had happened. Deep down, I still wanted to get everything back — my marriage, my children — and was trying to figure out how it might happen. But Nicky, who was enjoying being in control of the situation, seemed to have no intention of taking me back. She knew I was unhappy and struggling to cope, but showed little sympathy. In fact, she gave the impression she was loving every minute of it.
As a sportsman in self-imposed exile, I felt completely lost. My career was gone, my reputation ruined. All of a sudden I was in the position where I was being labelled a loser. Along with the loss of my children, I was mourning the loss of my place in the world, my identity. Retirement is something all sportsmen have to cope with, but that doesn’t make it any easier when it happens.
And in that scary state, removed from the public spotlight, I began to think that although there were things about cricket I missed, there were also things about it I hated. I looked back on my career and thought of all the sacrifices I’d made.
There’s this image some people have that playing cricket for England is one long party, interrupted by a few matches at glamorous locations. If it was like that in the old days when touring was more leisurely, it certainly isn’t now. God knows how many lonely, anxious nights I spent in hotel rooms in strange cities preparing for the next day’s Test match. It was often bloody hard, but I used to rationalize it by telling myself this is what I had to do. I was earning a living to support my family, and it made me proud to be able to do that. That was what got me out of bed in the morning; it motivated me.
Now things looked different. What had I gone through all that shit for? For this? Was this how it was all to end? A divorce and my life splashed over the newspapers? That was not what I thought I was buying into.