Former England batsman and assistant and coach Graham Thorpe has died on the age of 55.
Thorpe’s former county Surrey led the tributes after his tragic passing was introduced on Monday morning. In a press release, chair Oli Slipper described him as considered one of Surrey’s ‘nice sons’.
‘He’s a legend of Surrey and introduced nice delight to the Membership carrying each the Three Feathers and the Three Lions.’ The assertion continued.
‘He made excellent contributions to the Membership as a cricketer, and as a person, and he shall be so sorely missed.’
The left-handed batsman was famend as one of many most interesting English gamers in latest historical past. He performed precisely 100 Checks and scored 16 centuries earlier than retiring in 2005.
Throughout his taking part in profession, Thorpe averaged a powerful 44.7 runs in Check matches. His highest rating was 200 not out and the gifted middle-order batsmen additionally performed 77 One Day Internationals.
One in every of his most memorable Check innings got here in 2000 towards Pakistan in Karachi. After a remaining day implosion from the hosts, Thorpe produced an unbeaten 64 in close to darkness in direction of the top of his innings to guide England to their first sequence win in Pakistan for 39 years, and Pakistan’s first loss on the Nationwide Stadium in 35 years.
‘I believe actually 5 to 10 minutes after we got here off, it was pitch black,’ Thorpe advised Cricket Month-to-month . ‘From the dressing room, coming again on to the balcony, it was pitch black.
‘We opened up bottles of lemonade, as a result of we could not drink in Pakistan. We had been on a flight again to Dubai that night, the place we did have a couple of Guinnesses. There was a couple of two-hour turnaround from the top of the sport, again to the lodge and on to a flight that evening.’
Thorpe racked up greater than 2,000 runs within the shorter format of the sport and his intelligence and management allowed a clean transition into teaching when he retired from taking part in in 2006.
He went on to start a training profession in Australia, the place he labored with the likes of Steve Smith and David Warner at New South Wales, earlier than becoming a member of the England and Wales Cricket Board as a batting coach.
He labored as assistant with the senior aspect underneath Trevor Bayliss and Chris Silverwood, stepping as much as lead the crew on this winter’s Sydney Check towards Australia as a consequence of Silverwood’s coronavirus analysis.
The ECB additionally launched a press release after the shock information of Thorpe’s demise. A publish from the physique on X learn: ‘It’s with nice unhappiness that we share the information that Graham Thorpe, MBE, has handed away. There appear to be no applicable phrases to explain the deep shock we really feel at Graham’s demise.’
