Tragic Losses Drive A New Mission For Sports Safety
Amanda Thorpe and Debbie Beard met for the first time this month, brought together by loss neither of them expected to share. Their conversation came at an event hosted by the Prince of Wales and the Royal Foundation. It has helped launch a fresh drive for Graham Thorpe suicide prevention work, begun in his memory across professional sport.
Amanda’s husband, the former England and Surrey cricketer Graham Thorpe, took his own life in 2024. He had struggled with severe depression after losing his coaching job in 2022. Debbie’s husband, Matt Beard, the former Liverpool Women manager, died on 20 September 2025, a month after he left his post at Burnley Women. His death is believed to have been suicide, though an inquest has yet to conclude.
Two families, two sports, one shared story. Both women now want their experience to change how football and cricket look after the people who play and coach at the top level.
Unpacking The Silent Crisis Behind Sudden Job Losses
Both losses followed a strikingly similar pattern. A sudden end to a coaching career was followed by a steep, largely hidden decline. Amanda says the warning signs in Graham’s case stretched back further than most people realised.
Graham had been struggling for the previous year to 18 months during Covid. Graham didn’t really like following rules and there were quite a few in Covid – like playing under bubble conditions. So he had been having some medication and therapy in his job. But then Graham lost his job and he didn’t see it coming.
Debbie describes a similar build-up before Matt’s death, shaped by results and public criticism rather than a pandemic.
I think there were changes in behaviour, looking back. Performance-wise the team weren’t doing well so there was a lot of abuse on social media. He could never really speak his truth during media interviews of what was going on behind the scenes and he used to sound off to me at home.
Neither man had a public outlet for what was happening behind the scenes. The pressure built quietly, at home, long before anyone outside the family noticed.
Amanda Thorpe And Debbie Beard Expose Institutional Shortfalls
Amanda traces a turning point in Graham’s decline to a leaked video from an Ashes tour, which brought a shame he found hard to shake off.
Yes. It’s OK if you win but you’re not allowed to have a drink if you lose. He was probably in shock. He couldn’t believe it. And he was embarrassed and ashamed about this stupid video, which to me he blew way out of proportion. But he was in this tunnel where he thought he’d messed it all up. So he went into a quick and steep decline.
Debbie recalls a similarly abrupt fall for Matt after his sacking, and behaviour that changed almost overnight.
The sacking came out of the blue and there was a lot of speculation around that. He was starting to drink more than he would have done normally. In terms of his behaviour, I would say he was taking a lot of risks as well. So maybe that was the start of this with him.
Both women shared these details in an interview reported by BBC Sport, and described how little support remained once their husbands left their roles. Contracts ended, but the toll of years in high-pressure jobs did not.
Their accounts point to the same gap in the system. Sport moves on quickly after a departure, yet the person at the centre of it is often left without a plan for what comes next.
How The On Your Side Toolkit Aims To Protect Future Athletes
The event where Amanda and Debbie met introduced ‘On Your Side’, an online toolkit designed to embed suicide prevention into sport at every level, from grassroots clubs to elite dressing rooms. Organisers hope it becomes a standard resource, not just a one-off statement.
The ambition behind Graham Thorpe suicide prevention work like this is to give clubs, coaches and players practical steps to spot warning signs. Amanda and Debbie now recognise these signs only in hindsight, such as sudden changes in drinking, added risk-taking, and a reluctance to speak honestly in public.
Cricket has faced its own reckoning with player welfare in recent years, a theme explored in our earlier report on the pressures facing the game’s biggest names. The hope now is that the toolkit turns painful personal testimony into lasting change, so that the next sudden departure from a dressing room does not end the way Graham Thorpe’s and Matt Beard’s did.
