The way the light falls
Some memories of Graham Thorpe
It started with a guy called Pete, who lived over the back of us. Pete said that he opened the batting for the Wrecclesham second XI and he had two ambitions in cricket. One was to hit the opening delivery of a match for six, the other was to score fifty, neither of which he had so far done. Trying to fulfil the first of his ambitions was costing him the second. Pete was out first ball more often than anyone I’ve ever seen, but he never gave up on his dream.
He told my dad that Wrecclesham had a strong junior section and my dad, ambitious for me, got us straight over there. Pete was right. There were U13, U15 and U17 teams, all playing lots of cricket. I was the right age to play in all three. The U17s starred the Charter brothers, Martin and Steve, who opened the batting and bowling respectively. Martin was already in the men’s first team and Steve took the new ball with Andy Partridge, who was Wrecclesham’s fastest bowler and who took great delight in ‘wanging them down’ as he liked to say.
Then there were the Thorpe brothers. Ian was my age and already captain of the U13s and U15s, a natural leader. Alan was a year or so younger, another all-rounder, and Graham the youngest, then barely big enough for a full-sized bat. Their dad Geoff was the first team captain and their mum Toni the scorer. Almost every match that Wrecclesham played involved some combination of the Thorpes. Driving to games, Geoff’s car would sometimes come rocketing past my dad’s on narrow country lanes, the Thorpe boys laughing and giving the thumbs up from the back seat as they egged Geoff on.
Wrecclesham’s home ground was the Rec, an unlovely, sloping football field just off the high street. It was often windswept and cold and I don’t remember ever getting too many runs there, but by contrast the teams we played had some of the oldest and loveliest village grounds in the country: Tilford, Frensham, Rowledge, Churt, the Bourne and many others I’ve half forgotten, just fragments of memories of twilight 20 over games, rushing to beat the oncoming dusk. For me, it’s still the most magical time to play. The way the light falls on those grounds, with their swales and hollows casting odd shadows, shaped how I see the game.
We won, a lot. We had an opening bowler called Graeme Larby, the same age as me and Ian, who had a gloriously natural run up and action and who once reduced Frensham to seven all out on a sunny midweek afternoon at the Rec. Graeme won us many matches as did the Thorpes, who were all buccaneering cricketers, highly combative and usually at the heart of the game with both bat and ball. They always believed we would win. I remember one evening match, also at the Rec, in which Ian and Alan, batting together, took us to a seemingly impossible victory with electric running between the wickets. I can see them now, walking off with their arms around each other, knowing they’d done something special. And I remember standing by the same boundary with Ian one evening watching Graham bat, and Ian saying, “Gray’s way better than all of us…”
The Thorpes went to Weydon school, a comprehensive that was much feared in the area for the toughness of its football teams. There were no ‘development pathways’ out of Weydon, or out of Wrecclesham. If you wanted to get anywhere you had to do it yourself, and that’s what happened. The Thorpes moved to Farnham, the biggest club in the area, with a ground by the castle at the top of the hill where Graham would set all kinds of batting records. I went and played for Basingstoke, where Martin and Steve Charter also played, and that was that. The next I really heard of Graham was when he was being talked about for England after just a couple of seasons at Surrey.
He was up there with the ‘bat pack’, his true cohort of the most talented players born at the same time: Mark Ramprakash, who remembered yesterday knowing Graham as an U12 cricketer, Nasser Hussain, Mike Atherton and Mark Butcher. He was maybe the best of them, too, a fabulous player of high pace and quality spin, but the figures don’t really matter now. Those benighted teams of the 1990s are loved in a very particular way, a different way to how later, more successful England teams are regarded (and if you want to read something brilliant on the reasons why, get Emma John’s wonderful book Following On). By a fluke of time they encountered giants of the game, and were almost always outgunned by them.
It was apparent from 2002 onwards that Graham, like so many players, had an ambiguous relationship with the sport, exacerbated by both its endless uncertainties and the nature of English cricket before central contracts were introduced in 2000. As he said in his book – which Simon Wilde, his ghost, writes brilliantly about here – not everyone in the dressing room took pleasure in others’ successes. There were long and miserable tours without their families where they were treated like chattels. At one point, Thorpe was away for ten winters in a row and it killed his first marriage, which in turn led to a breakdown and half an idea that he’d put a Fathers 4 Justice sticker on his bat. He worried away at his bat handles like no other player, looking for that connection that could bring some kind of faith in an impossible game.
He played some of the great innings, usually backs to the wall jobs, maybe because he grew up fighting for everything. After that famous knock in Karachi in the dark, he said, “it was like playing for Wrecclesham in the Flora Doris Trophy.”
When my mum was moving house a couple of years ago, I found an old scrapbook. Inside were a couple of photographs and a newspaper clipping from when Wrecclesham U15s won the Surrey Cup. The final was at Guildford but the trophy was presented during the tea interval of a Sunday League game at the Oval, with, as the clipping says, “10,000 people looking on.” In one of the photos, my dad, ostensibly the team ‘manager’, is introducing us to the Surrey captain Roger Knight, which, if you knew my dad, would have been an interesting experience given that he could never remember anyone’s name. God we look young, and I’m older now than my dad was in the picture. But the names and the faces come back in a flood, and I wonder how everyone’s lives turned out. I suspect that almost all of us in that photograph thought of Graham and his family yesterday. His professional life was stellar, but other parts were hard, perhaps impossibly so, and there’s a deep and abiding sadness to that.
Vale, Graham, and well batted.
A couple more NBs: Pete never hit the first ball of a match for six but he did get his fifty, ironically in a warm-up game at the Rec against the U17s. I remember standing in the field as he carved away against Steve Charter and Andy Partridge until the applause from the pavilion broke out. Pete raised both arms in triumph and shouted, “I’ve waited thirty years for this…” And a while ago I looked up Wrecclesham CC online. Graeme Larby had taken more than a thousand wickets for them. That lad could bowl…
Awesome read 👍