The little genius and England's batting rock... courageous against pace, canny in a spinners' paradise

DARKNESS was falling like a curtain on Karachi when Graham Thorpe edged the winning runs in light barely fit for mining coal.

- MIKE WALTERS

He never got enough credit for that unbeaten 64, culminating in the Chinese cut off Saqlain Mushtaq which took England to the chequered flag in 2000, after Pakistan's timewasting had threatened to leave them stranded agonisingly short of victory.

That was the year Australia had been celebrating swimmer Ian Thorpe's hat-trick of gold medals at the Sydney Olympics, but we had the real Thorpedo.

His big mate Nasser Hussain, who once described Thorpe as a "little genius" among England's dizzying cast of underachievers, was with him in the middle when the twilight heist was complete.

Three months later, in a Colombo furnace, Thorpe was England's hero again, picking his way through the minefield of Muttiah Muralitharan's corkscrew spin to seal another overseas Test series triumph against the odds.

The following year there would be a freewheeling double century in Christchurch; in the next, a comeback hundred after an intermission to address turbulence in his private lifeat The Oval.

And in Barbados, with the hourglass on his Test career running short of sand, Thorpe's unbeaten 117 against West Indies in 2004 was an absolute masterclass where none of his team-mates managed more than 17.