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Ian Botham

(SOMERSET AND ENGLAND)

Underneath that volcanic public image, Ian Botham is a very genuine sort, as loyal to his friends as he is unforgiving to his enemies. And he’s energetically outspoken in both respects! I am glad to count him as a friend, even if it is demanding on one’s energy at times.

I had not seen a great deal of him until we met as players for England. He came to Leicester with Somerset in June 1977. He was swinging the ball a lot in those days. I seem to remember that I was not picking up the ball too well – he certainly hit me on the shoulder with a bouncer. I top-edged another over the keeper for 4 – he says I pulled it. I did get some runs (56 and 30) while Botham was bowled by Ken Higgs for a duck. All this was a prelude to our first real meeting in the England dressing room, an experience I shall never forget. Ian has always been boisterous and you always know when he is around. Your one chance of a little peace is if he should take a quick nap – the moment he says ‘I’m bored’, that’s the time to watch out. Your newspaper might suddenly go up in flames, no-one’s cricket bag is inviolate; the jokes, the horseplay, the antics will continue until he is obliged to go out to bat, or it is time for lunch.

He is at his brightest and most inventive when things are going well for him, but even in a bad patch he is never down for long. Accidentally or deliberately he was marvellous with Geoff Boycott when he came back into the side, never letting him stay aloof, forcing the general team spirit on him.

Rooming with him is enough to give weaker spirits a nervous breakdown. You need a very high tolerance level because Ian’s phenomenal energy makes any kind of routine impossible. He cannot go to bed at ten p.m. and wake at eight. I was his room-mate in Sydney for a week in 1978–9 but that worked quite well since it must be said I wasn’t too well at the time, having picked up a virus. I spent two or three days in bed and Ian was quiet during that time, so much so that I wondered what was going on. Bernard Thomas has for some reason kept us apart since then and although I did offer to share a room with Ian in Colombo, the lot eventually fell to John Lever.

Once in India, when accommodation was very tight and it seemed that the players and press might have to be mixed up by sharing rooms, the manager, Raman Subba Row and Peter Smith, chairman of the Cricket Writers, drew up a joke list that had Ian sharing with Dick Streeton of The Times. Dick, a veteran of the press box, had not endeared himself to Botham with some of his criticisms; also his life-style was quite unlike Ian’s. Most though, including Dick, were amused by the apparent pairing until the bluff was called and both were accommodated separately and safely.

Later on that same tour Dick was fiercely critical of Botham’s behaviour on the field in Madras; a copy of the paper found its way to the dressing-room. That evening Ian, having had a few lagers after a particularly enervating day in the field, decided he wanted to debate the matter further and stormed up to Dick’s room. Accounts of what happened afterwards are hazy from both sides, but it seems that The Times man may have outmanoeuvred the world’s greatest all-rounder. What isn’t disputed is that Dick was most hospitable with his bottle of Johnny Walker and, according to Dick, the pair parted expressing great friendship and mutual esteem. According to Botham, when taxed about the episode the following morning in the dressing-room, a great deal had been discussed and the air cleared. ‘What did you say to him?’ he was asked. Replied Ian, bringing the house down: ‘I can’t remember.’ Geoff Cook was Ian’s original room-mate in India; Ian played him up a lot and nearly wore him out but Geoff, true to style, never complained, although he probably needed a week with Chris Tavaré to recover!

It’s impossible to be upset with Ian for long, if only because he’s always liable to go off and do something else unpredictable. He can’t do anything by halves. He takes his soccer and his golf very seriously; if he drives a car, it’s not just to go from A to B or round a circuit. The same with his flying. He has a competitive, killer instinct that makes everything he does a challenge, a drive that is reinforced by colossal reserves of energy. He can do nothing on a small scale. He reduced his golf handicap to eight, starting off a little wayward but, as you can imagine, he hits the ball a very long way. His soccer commitment is a hundred and ten per cent; he once travelled across England for a charity match in Scunthorpe. And when we played a five-a-side match in Guyana, intended as a keep-fit exercise while the political arguments raged, it turned into a fairly serious, not to say dangerous affair.

He’s matured as a player, particularly as a batsman in the last couple of years. He never says much when he goes in to bat, rarely much more than ‘I’ll play as I know how’. What does upset him is to be called a slogger by the press. Ian is openly antagonistic to the media, particularly newspapers, a dislike that dates back mostly to his spell as England’s captain. Since then the continuing allegation that he is overweight has angered him and he has never forgiven one newspaper for asking his young son Liam to tell them what his Daddy was eating. When Ian resigned the captaincy, after the first two Tests against Australia in 1981, he implied then that he would never speak to newspapers again. That was the culmination of what must have been the unhappiest spell in his life.

In that previous twelve months he had had back trouble that severely hampered his bowling, making all the difference between slipping two out or perhaps five out, the difference between an important and a mediocre bowling performance. He led England for nine successive Tests against the world champions West Indies, a job in which no-one could have succeeded a hundred per cent and a job that was undoubtedly a strain on him because inevitably he lost much of the freedom he so enjoys as a player.

As a captain he has many assets: an enormous natural flair for the game, a basic cricket sense, a fund of good ideas of the sort he still offers from slip, a characteristic desire to attack, whether in setting the fields or using bowlers, and a very sound appreciation of all the facets of the game. As he would tell you, he had two great teachers – Brian Close and Mike Brearley. It’s true Ian had to learn about leading England as he went along; he didn’t always have total support from his players, some of whom did not appreciate his methods of captaincy, but the ranks closed behind him the more the press began to hound him.

He got a duck in each innings at Lord’s against the Australians in 1981 and when he walked back through the Long Room I am told it resembled a morgue. Instead of getting behind him then people seemed to turn against him and although there was no lack of sympathy in the dressing-room it was an awkward time for everyone: of the eleven players present there were some confident enough of their own status to offer that sympathy and others who were capable only of letting the situation slide.

It’s too easy to say that Ian’s return to form was a direct result of his withdrawal from the captaincy. I have to confess, not surprisingly, that there was much gloom in the Leeds dressing-room when the news broke that Monday morning. But then, as the stand between Graham Dilley and Ian developed, our attention grew and so did the crowd’s. His knock at Old Trafford was the better of two astonishing innings, being more controlled throughout despite the power of his hitting. Both performances emphasized how much we had lost of him as a player while he was captain. Mike Brearley’s return to the captaincy did, however, take the pressure off Ian, resulting in incredible performances with the bat at Leeds and Old Trafford, and with the ball at Edgbaston. Frank Keating relates that the Guardian received a reader’s letter: ‘Sir, on Friday I watched J. M. Brearley directing his fieldsman very carefully. He then looked up at the sun and made a gesture which suggested that it should move a little squarer. Who is this man? Yrs etc.’ I’m not really sure that, in fact, Brearley could persuade the sun to move, but he certainly transformed Ian Botham into an Apollo-like figure that summer of 1981.

The Australians learned their lessons, too. Once Ian is under way he can keep going in such devastating fashion that no bowlers can live with him. The mistake they made in England was to try to protect the whole field from him, instead of attempting to restrict him to one side of the wicket. In Australia in 1982–3 he attracted the critics once again, myself included, during his build-up to the Tests, by an apparently over-casual approach to State games. His oft repeated ‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll be all right for the Tests’ became increasingly irritating.

When the time came, in the first Test at Perth, the awaited explosion didn’t occur. The fortunes didn’t smile on him with the bat, and his bowling was generally disappointing. In Adelaide he batted well; he and I thought we might be able to save the match had we been able to last out another session or two. But he was caught at cover, cutting the spinner, a disappointing end from what was perhaps a slight misjudgement. It was a poor shot by the standards of his earlier summers but if two or three more had battled on as bravely as Ian did England would have escaped defeat. In Melbourne the most obvious thing Ian did was to bowl the ball that won the match. Freelance photographer Graham Morris was on his way home to England, flying between Sydney and Singapore. When the news reached him of England’s win, he sprayed the plane with champagne shouting ‘Botham for God’ and was put off at Singapore. That’s the effect Ian can have on people!

It was mostly Ian’s bowling that worried his friends during the series. He didn’t seem to move that potent weapon, his outswinger, tending to bowl only inswing, and he ran in more often like a stock bowler than a strike bowler. In the World Series Cup he had a side-strain which restricted him even further; after Adelaide he admitted he had bowled badly and apologized privately. Bob Willis became loth to put him in to bowl, hesitating to assume that he would bowl ten overs.

For Ian it was a frustrating and mediocre tour and by the end of it he was not in the best physical or mental shape. I believe he needed a break after something like fifty-eight consecutive Tests and fifty-seven consecutive one-day internationals. When the game is going well you feel you can go on playing forever; when you are having a thin time you soon feel exhausted, drained. What Ian needed was time to do the other things he enjoys so much so that he could rekindle his enthusiasm for cricket.

Just before the tour began Ian gave a television interview to Peter Alliss that summed up his philosophy in a way that has rarely been apparent in his other media interviews: ‘When the wheel of fortune is stuck with your name on it, you’ve got to make the most of it, you’ve got to nail it because there will come a time when nothing goes right. If you could get a hundred, or five wickets, every time you went out you wouldn’t be human, you’d just be a machine and there would be no fun in the game. The press built me up into a superstar and then seemed to enjoy hacking away at that statue. The thing I enjoyed most about 1981 was plastering it up again’.

He was then asked about the incident in Madras when Dick Streeton, in common with most of the English press, criticized Botham for making gestures at India’s Yashpal Sharma. Ian’s reply almost certainly contained what he couldn’t remember saying to Streeton! ‘It’s easy to sit back and criticize from a distance. It’s very different out there bowling on a flat slow wicket when it’s very hot and the sweat is pouring out of you and you’re all keyed up to do well. I’ve no regrets about what I did.’ Peter Alliss then asked Botham what his reaction would be if young Liam had made a similar gesture. Back came that disarming grin: ‘I’d probably clip him round the ear.’ Ian then explained his attitude as a professional which is something we all share to some degree. ‘Cricket may be a game to some but not to me. It’s not just a game, it’s my living. I give it everything I’ve got and when I’m doing that I know I am liable to lose my temper.’

That famous temper first won him the attention of the media when he was little more than a boy playing grade cricket in Melbourne. The story goes that Ian Chappell, then at his most famous as Australia’s ruthless and winning captain, was supposed to have made some derogatory remarks about England and English cricketers in the hearing of a group inside a bar close by the Melbourne ground, much used by cricketing people. Words were exchanged and the unknown Botham is then supposed to have flared up, dumped Chappell on the seat of his pants and chased him out of the bar. I have heard it said that Ian is still waiting for the chance to finish it off. But, let it be said, I have also seen Ian respond with no more than a smile and a few words to some pretty intense provocation from Australians who were drunk enough to imagine themselves sufficiently tough to take him on.

However his reputation is such that stories, true or false, will always be attributed to him – the press always seems ready to pounce, as with the supposed brawl between Ian and Rodney Hogg in Sydney. It didn’t happen. Both sides were invited, on New Year’s Eve, to Pier One, a restaurant on a converted wharf in Sydney, to celebrate and watch the fireworks over the harbour. There were seven or eight England players, perhaps four or five Australians. No one stayed till midnight.

Botham, Lamb and myself left about eleven p.m. I was standing with the Australians as my two England colleagues walked past on the way out. There were a couple of jokes and a couple of laughs but certainly no hostility, not even a raised voice – Ian and Rodney Hogg get on well together. When Ian learned what had been published in England his immediate reaction was: ‘They’re gunning for me again.’ When we read something like that abroad, when the player involved is struggling to find some form, the immediate reaction is one of hostility to the press. Once Ian had decided on legal action the affair passed over very quickly and the Sun newspaper printed an apology.

Ian found himself in another flare-up over reported remarks about Australian umpires. Doug Insole, the manager, fined him with some reluctance, accepting that Ian believed that any comments he had made were not to be quoted. Later he aroused much sympathy over this in the dressing-room where feelings were running fairly high after the two Sydney Test incidents – when John Dyson’s run out wasn’t given and when there was the contention over the bat and boot issue with Kim Hughes. Yet in the end Ian had to accept that this time it was his own fault for he knew it was his responsibility to see that anything quoted by him in the newspapers had to be passed by the appropriate authority in advance.

Whatever may be printed to the contrary, Ian Botham is very close to Bob Willis. They have a huge respect for each other’s capabilities. Bob has a standard phrase for Ian for when he gets a bit worked up: ‘No violence, Guy [this being the original nickname, Guy the Gorilla, bestowed by Geoff Boycott] no violence.’ Whatever words may fly between them the basic feeling they have for each other precludes any possibility of a serious rift in friendship or cooperation.

I should emphasize too that the one time Ian played under me I had his complete support. He offered all possible help; you seem to get the best out of him by letting him have his way when setting the field or bowling a spell – then he really does make things happen.