Graham Thorpe: A fighter whose honesty endeared him to England fans

Graham Thorpe 's England career was the promise of better times, melded with the reality that they sometimes seemed unobtainable. His emotions lived and breathed through the combativeness of his strokeplay. When he was up, he was a force to rival any of the mighty protagonists in perhaps the last truly global era of Test batsmanship. When he was down, his returns were so subterranean they almost reeked of despair. Above and beyond his 100 Tests, 16 centuries and a batting average of 44.66 that was higher than, inter alia, Gower, Gooch, Cowdrey and Vaughan, his raw humanity was his defining trait, and a generation loved him for the honesty with which he projected it.

Thorpe's tragic death at the age of 55 has, quite rightly, unleashed a wave of heartfelt tributes from across the sport, spanning his former team-mates and rivals, as well as a host of the modern-day stars whose careers were moulded during his long second innings as a coach with Surrey and England. However, it's the unseen echelons of appreciation that perhaps speak most eloquently of the adoration his career engendered. All morning long, WhatsApp groups have been bursting with reminiscence at the hope he instilled in so many lost England causes of the 1990s, and by extension the central role he played in causing so many people to fall in love with the game in the first place. But then, underpinning it all, is this shuddering jolt at the sheer fragility of existence. More than one acquaintance of mine has stated that they have never felt more affected by a non-family death. It doesn't feel overblown to concur.

What, then, was the reason for this peculiar and deep-rooted affection? The events of Thorpe's debut at Trent Bridge in 1993 played a part, of course - after being bounced out by Merv Hughes for single figures in his maiden innings, he seemed to knuckle down and toughen up almost overnight. With inevitable defeat looming at the fall of England's fifth second-innings wicket, he responded with a combative, indomitable 114 - making him England's first debut centurion since Frank Hayes against West Indies a full 20 years earlier - that slowly but inexorably ground out a position from which to push for victory. Auspiciously for his narrative purposes, this was done, first, in partnership with the mighty Graham Gooch - Thorpe's most-legitimate predecessor as England's truly world-class batter - and then with Nasser Hussain, then another young prospect whose defiance and tenacity would come to prove so crucial to England's steady rise in standards across the span of their careers.

Perhaps fittingly, Australia's refusal to yield (this time through Steve Waugh and Brendon Julian) would deny Thorpe and England the fairytale finish to this most uplifting of beginnings. Because, even if it only became truly apparent in hindsight, there would be something exquisitely noble about England's struggles through the rest of the 1990s - an era blessed, lest we forget, with perhaps the most relentless churn of world-class attacking bowlers ever assembled. If it wasn't McGrath and Warne lined up against England, it was Ambrose and Walsh. Or Wasim and Waqar. Or Donald and Pollock. Or Murali and Vaas. Tennis fans who have spent the last week coming to terms with the retirement of Andy Murray will recognise the magnificence required simply to compete in such a rarified era, let alone to deliver a clutch of the greatest victories ever compiled against the odds.

For a time after his debut, Thorpe's brilliance was visible only in snatched opportunities. The epithet "selfless" soon attached itself to his methods, most particularly on England's subsequent tour of the Caribbean, where his twin scores of 86 and 84 were instrumental in setting up two further victory shots, in Trinidad and Barbados. And yet, the defining image of Thorpe's personal campaign would come right in between those two efforts: his hauntingly bleak stare into the middle distance at Port-of-Spain , with his stumps shattered and the scoreboard reading 40 for 8 after Ambrose's thrilling fourth-evening rampage. It was a look that questioned his very life choices, that telegraphed - albeit fleetingly - the futility of resistance. Magnificently he was unbowed by the time of his next second innings, a fortnight later in Bridgetown , with a pitch-perfect declaration push that ensured his team would leave a brutal tour with at least one all-timer of an upset to look back on.

And yet, with England about to entrust their management to the hard-bitten "supremo", Ray Illingworth, Thorpe's integral importance to the team that Mike Atherton was trying to create would be under-valued for a while yet. Where his colleagues saw a man gunning only for what was best for the collective, Illingworth's binary attitude to run-scoring saw instead a talented rookie who was too flighty to knuckle down and make the most of his promise. As an aside, if Mark Ramprakash and Graeme Hick are commonly cited as the two players of the 1990s who would have benefited most from the introduction of ECB central contracts, Thorpe would surely have been the foremost apostle of Bazball.

It's ironic, therefore, that having been dropped for the first four Tests of the 1994 summer, Thorpe marked his return to the team with a trio of 70s that turned the tide in another thrilling series against South Africa . In keeping with the methods that were already his calling card, each of his innings came at a strike rate significantly higher than a run every two balls, and while it may seem glib to make a big deal of such relatively dour scoring, Thorpe's genius was not unlike that of Joe Root in the current England line-up. His tracer-like cover-driving and his all-enveloping pull shots would catch the eye when his blood was up, but the bread-and-butter of his matchcraft were the dinks and nudges - often deep in the crease, square-on to the bowler- that kept the strike rotating and the scoreboard ticking. In an age of grim survival, best exemplified by Atherton's broad blade presented straight back down the line, Thorpe's proactivity epitomised a willingness to keep striving for something more. His was a defiant optimism that chimed with the times, and kept his fans rapt throughout these years of adversity.

Clearly, any professional sportsman needs to offer substance to back up the style, but the occasion of Thorpe's second Test century was pitch-perfect in England's straitened circumstances. On a typical Perth flyer, at the tail-end of a desperate tour, he arrived at the crease with Atherton and Mike Gatting dispatched in McGrath's opening over, but surged onto the offensive in a 158-run stand with Ramprakash that felt like nothing less than the dawning of a brand-new era. In the shimmering white heat of the WACA, a vista that always seemed to be projected more viscerally into the cold of an English winter living room, out came Thorpe's idiosyncratic wallop of his bat as he sprinted through for the landmark single, arms outstretched, before the removal of his helmet and a glimpse of his lesser-spotted white headband - a treat that always signified the attainment of a rare peak. Not even a predictable reversion to England's mean in the second innings could taint the sense of a page turned. On the contrary, as McGrath ripped through the top-order to deliver an inglorious end to both Gooch and Gatting's Test careers, amid a wrecked scoreline of 27 for 6, it became ever more apparent around whom England were obliged to rebuild their fortunes.

And so it would come to pass. Notwithstanding the summer of 1999, when the accumulation of a decade of beatings would result in England's slumping to the foot of the unofficial world rankings, it was possible to detect an incremental uptick in Test standards across the back end of the decade; from England's hard-fought series win in New Zealand in 1996-97 (featuring two Thorpe hundreds) to their staggering Ashes victory at Edgbaston the following summer (featuring Thorpe's 138 alongside Hussain's career-best 207). When a back injury restricted his involvement in the home series win over South Africa in 1998 (England's first in a five-Test series since 1986-87) it was partly as a consequence of him having become the first England player to feature in ten consecutive winter tours (Test and A-team) - in an age, remember, before central contracts offered any such assurances of continuity.

Fittingly, therefore, Thorpe's zenith would arrive at the very moment when his value to England was finally and officially recognised. The introduction of ECB central contracts in 2000 came after he had unilaterally opted out of the tour of South Africa the previous winter, amid the first stirrings of the marital problems that would gnaw away at his equilibrium in the final years of his career. But, given the chance to be fully valued by the team to whom he had given so much, he repaid the faith with the single greatest winter of his career, and one of the greatest in England's touring history.

Other wins carry more resonance: England in Australia in 2010-11, or India in 2012-13. But given where England had come from, and the distance they still had to travel, their twin victories in Pakistan and Sri Lanka in 2000-01 remain extraordinary monuments to the resilience of an underappreciated generation. Thorpe himself bookended the triumphs; first in Lahore where he epitomised his captain's call to fight with every sinew of his being in producing a stalemate-sealing century that featured just a solitary boundary. Then, after picking off the winning runs in England's miraculous victory in the dark in Karachi , he capped his endeavours in Kandy and Colombo in the new year, willing himself to endure through Sri Lanka's sticky, sapping heat to overcome an innings loss in Galle and land a sensational 2-1 win.

The enduring image of that campaign was of a deathly pale Thorpe, eyes so hollow they might as well have been caked in mascara, willing himself back out to the middle having already won the match once with his stamina-draining 113 not out in the first innings at the SSC . When Sri Lanka collapsed to 81 all out in reply his work should have been done. Instead, England themselves tumbled to 71 for 6, chasing 74. But for his follow-up 32 not out, the day would have been lost. He was so shattered afterwards, he was unable to take any part in the team's raucous celebrations.

Thorpe had another faraway look in his eyes two summers later, against India at Lord's in 2002, when the torment of his personal life was etched into every one of his all-too-public actions. He made 4 and 1 in that contest, which was five more runs than his spirit seemed willing to offer to the occasion, and when it was announced soon after the contest that he would be taking an indefinite break from cricket, it was merely the rubber-stamping of a fact that his misery had already made clear.

Not that it mattered remotely in his personal circumstances, but Thorpe's decision meant that he would miss the 2002-03 tour of Australia, thereby leaving an incredible dent in his Ashes record; just two Tests out of a possible 15 since the end of 1997, with injury having ruled him out of both the 1998-99 and 2001 campaigns.

It was not the end of his story by any stretch of the imagination. Rarely in England's history has there been an ovation to match that which greeted Thorpe's comeback century, inevitably in a winning cause, against South Africa at The Oval in 2003 , while his final winters as an England cricketer were similarly triumphant, with central roles in series wins in the Caribbean (still unreplicated to this day) and South Africa, for the first time in the post-Apartheid era.

By the time of the 2005 Ashes, however, the emergence of Kevin Pietersen - coupled with England's determination, not unlike that which led to Thorpe's own breakthrough ten years previously, to proceed with a new generation unencumbered by the scars of the past - meant that he dipped quietly out of international cricket with the occasion of his 100th Test, against Bangladesh in Chester-le-Street

It was an oddly fitting ending for a man who had been destined to carry his side through adversity, and earn along the way the undying love and gratitude of those true aficionados who recognised the exquisite glory of the struggle.