Читать книгу Botham: My Autobiography - Ian Botham, Ian Botham - Страница 9
ОглавлениеI sometimes wonder what would have happened to the career of Ian Botham if Andy Roberts had not smashed my teeth in.
I remember the occasion as though it was yesterday – and who wouldn’t? After all, it is not often that you take a ball in the face from one of the greatest and most fearsome fast bowlers of all time, and live to tell the tale.
I only made the final XI for Somerset’s Benson and Hedges quarter-final against Hampshire in June 1974 because our pace bowler Allan Jones was ruled out with a leg strain, but I had already made my mark on proceedings in peculiar circumstances when I managed to remove Hampshire’s premier batsman, the South African Test star Barry Richards, rated as one of the all-time greats. Our wicket-keeper Derek Taylor used to stand up to the stumps for my bowling in those days (bloody cheek!) and, after I had bowled him, Richards actually stood his ground for a few moments because he was convinced that the ball with which I had beaten him all ends up must have cannoned off Derek’s pads onto the stumps (even more bloody cheek!). As a young tyro I was reasonably satisfied with the rest of my performance in the field that day, which brought one more wicket and the chance of some purposeful hurtling around the boundary. In fact, although I didn’t know it at the time, my whole life was about to change.
When I came to the wicket, Somerset were more or less dead and buried. Seventy runs were required from the final 15 overs as I marched out to bat at number 9, with only three wickets remaining. Tom Cartwright, my batting partner and the man to whom I owe more than anyone for helping me become a top-class bowler, soon departed from the action, caught at mid-on. And then, shortly after I had been joined by Hallam Moseley, it happened.
Andy Roberts had been terrorizing English county pros all season playing for Hampshire and was about to establish himself as the West Indies’ main strike bowler for a decade. With 38 runs needed, hooking him for six seemed like a good idea at the time. But I paid for my foolishness when, next ball, Roberts bowled me the fastest delivery I had ever seen, or, to be more accurate, not seen. I knew roughly from which direction it was coming and my first instinct was to try and hook it. Halfway through getting into position to play the shot the truth hit me – and then, a fraction of a second later so did the ball. These were pre-helmet days, of course, but I did just manage to raise a gloved hand in front of my face, and that instinctive act of self-preservation almost certainly saved me from serious injury. In the event, the force of the ball smacking into my glove which then, in turn, smacked into my face, was still sufficient to knock out one tooth and break another clean in half. Looking back, the worrying thing was that the teeth in question were on opposite sides of the jaw.
By the time I had spat them out, taken a glass of water and had a spot of treatment, I was fully aware that there were some in the crowd who, believing that the game was up, actually wanted me to go off retired hurt to avoid further, unnecessary punishment.
The thought never crossed my mind. In fact, there was very little crossing my mind at that particular moment. The effects of mild concussion meant that it was not until some time afterwards that I had any kind of clear recollection of what followed, but in a curious way I think the incident helped to settle me down. I predicted that Roberts’ next delivery would be a yorker, guessed right and managed to get enough bat on ball to clip it away for three runs. From then on, I succeeded in farming as much of the strike as possible so that, after Hallam departed, there were just seven runs needed to win from sixteen balls when number 11 Bob Clapp joined me.
Although those watching must have found the tension unbearable, my total concentration meant that I was in a cocoon. In the penultimate over I played and missed three times before connecting with the winning hit to the cover boundary. As a batsman, Bob was what is commonly known in the game as a ferret – he went in after the rabbits. But I will always be grateful to him for helping me make my name. He finished with one of the best nought not outs in history, I collected the Gold Award and the first chapter of the fairy tale was written.
That evening a couple of old Somerset players, Bill Alley and Kenny Palmer, who later went on to become Test umpires, warned me: ‘Today, you are everybody’s hero. Tomorrow, they’ll have forgotten you’. Needless to say I thanked them for the advice, but what I really felt was more along the lines of ‘Give it a rest, you old buggers’. In fact the lesson they were trying to pass on could not have been more apt and, as time passed, that peculiarly English phenomenon they were warning me about – newspaper today, fish-and-chip paper tomorrow – became a recurrent theme. For the moment all I could see were the headlines.
The first produced unexpected results. When I strode into the Gardener’s Arms for a celebratory pint of bitter and a spot of mild adulation, I informed the landlord, ‘The usual, please’.
I was somewhat taken aback by his response when he turned and asked: ‘And just what is your usual?’
‘The usual,’ I replied, a shade irritated. ‘You know what it is, the same as it’s been for the last year and a half.’
At this point, the local evening paper was produced and waved under my nose. The headline read: ‘17-YEAR-OLD SOMERSET YOUTH PLAYS A BLINDER’. Fortunately the landlord was chuckling as he poured out the pint, knowing full well that had he applied the letter of the licensing laws in my case, his profits would have been cut in half over the past 18 months.
When the next day brought my first experience of national newspaper coverage, you could not see my head for the clouds. ‘BLOOD, SWEAT AND CHEERS FOR BOTHAM’, announced the Guardian. ‘YOUNG BOTHAM THE SOMERSET HERO’ echoed the Daily Telegraph. Who was I to argue?
There is no doubt that the whole affair had an enormous effect on my career. Because of the press reaction, people all over the country had been made aware of the existence of somebody who up until that point had been, to almost all of them, a nobody. And it had all happened overnight.
We all want heroes to worship, whether they be sportsmen or women, film stars, actors, politicians, rock stars, brain surgeons or journalists. It may or may not surprise you to learn that John Wayne was mine. Now, because of my exploits on the field, I had set a certain standard for myself that many observers expected me to live up to every time I went out to bat or bowl. (I felt this particularly after the events of the summer of 1981 when the Australians were the victims of the best Test cricket of my life.) This meant that from then on, producing a great performance for Somerset carried extra significance. In terms of national awareness I was still a small fish in a big pool and, certainly in the opinion of good judges, I had nowhere near as much potential as another young Somerset batsman called Vivian Richards. But from that moment on, the name Botham rang a bell.
There is no doubt, either, that at this stage there was a very real danger of allowing the publicity to go to my head. Although my time on the Lord’s groundstaff had taught me many lessons in life, I was still young, raw and very naive. In fact, even to get as far as I had done, I was extremely fortunate to have been in the presence of two men who, despite all my efforts to exasperate them, were prepared to keep an eye on me and encourage me.
Brian Close, the man chiefly responsible for turning Somerset from a social side into a successful one, was a hard nut – some would say a nutter. A tough Yorkshire-man who was never prepared to compromise, his whole approach to the game was based on absolute belief in his own ability and that there was no point in turning up if you weren’t prepared to do everything to win. It was this self-belief that enabled him to play for England and attain the ‘double’ of 100 wickets and 1000 runs in county cricket at the age of eighteen. However, his abrasiveness meant he was never likely to be a darling of the establishment. It was no surprise to anyone, least of all him, when he was sacked from the England captaincy after the Yorkshire side he was skippering were booed off the field following his decision to use time-wasting tactics to ensure a draw against Warwickshire in 1967.
To others more mindful of personal safety, the call to return to Test cricket at the age of 45, after nine years in the international wilderness, might have been answered with two fingers. But when the England captain Tony Greig decided he needed the physical equivalent of a brick wall to stand up to the West Indies pace attack that had been battering his team black and blue during the summer of 1976, it was typical of Closey that he accepted without a moment’s hesitation. No one who witnessed it will ever forget his bravery when standing up to the horrendous onslaught from Roberts and Company in the Manchester gloom. Even Clive Lloyd, the West Indies captain, admitted his bowlers had gone over the top that day. But typical of Closey, he was just as proud of his bruises as he was of his batting. One of the standing jokes in the Somerset dressing room was his insistence that although Muhammad Ali might just beat him over fifteen rounds, he would be damned if the champ would knock him out. This was not just the usual dressing room bravado either, he really meant it. It goes without saying that I loved the guy for his guts. In fact, I would go so far as to say that starting out with Closey was vital for me because he taught me so much about attitude. He was the toughest man I ever played sport with or against and although, at one time or another, every single member of the side had their rows with him, he inspired us because he would never ask you to do anything he was not prepared to do himself and he would never, ever, give up. I’m sure that I had Closey’s example in the back of my mind when I was reacting to Roberts’ attempt at dental surgery in that Benson and Hedges quarter-final.
Closey was also instrumental in helping introduce into the club the young talent that was required to build for the future. Somerset eventually offered me a one-year contract, and I joined on the same day as Vic Marks, Phil Slocombe and Peter Roebuck, with Viv Richards soon to follow.
Although he was a hard drinker, Closey could also be a fearsome disciplinarian. Once, during a one-day game against Nottinghamshire at Trent Bridge he actually sent off one of his own players. Allan Jones was not bowling particularly well that day, but he was not the only one who was surprised when Closey called him across and made various rather undiplomatic observations about his performance and the size of his ticker. After a short row and amid much scratching of heads and suppressed laughter, Jones was dismissed, even though he had four overs still to bowl and there was no other recognized bowler to put on.
His one and only disagreement with me on the field came in similarly bizarre circumstances, not because I had played a rash shot (though God knows I played enough of them) nor because I had bowled badly or dropped a sitter. My crime was to perform a brilliant run out without due care and attention to what might have happened if I had missed. Although I was innocent on all counts, I have to concede that he did have a point. A few weeks after the game against Hampshire in the B&H, we were drawn against Surrey in the quarter-final of the Gillette Cup. I was bowling to Geoff Howarth, later to captain New Zealand, who proceeded to hit the ball back past me. I turned to my left with my back to the play, fielded the ball and, as I noticed the batsmen attempting a quick single, swivelled and hurled down the stumps. What I didn’t know was that there had been a serious communication problem between the two batsmen and, as they were both stuck down the striker’s end, I could actually have walked up and quietly removed the bails. Closey berated me at length for, in his eyes, showing off. We were still at logger-heads when the next batsman arrived to take strike. I argued that no one had shouted to let me know what was happening so I had no idea where the batsmen were. His point was that I should have known. That incident taught me the lesson of thinking, even in pressure situations, that I never forgot though I have to admit I didn’t always follow it to the letter on the field.
Occasionally I settled for simply trying to intimidate opponents with my presence, particularly when it came to my absolute conviction that I could always bounce batsmen out. Years later in 1984 against the West Indies at Lord’s, I overdid the delivery so much against Gordon Greenidge that I managed to concede 117 runs in just over 20 overs as they made 344 to win in less than a day. As far as I was concerned, the next one was bound to get him, but, of course, it never did.
Our success in beating Surrey enabled me to put another of Closey’s laws into practice in the semi-final against Kent. Although we lost by three wickets, I won a personal battle with Colin Cowdrey, then one of the legends of the game. Closey always tried to instil in me a feeling that I should never be overawed by the reputation of whoever might be standing at the other end, whether batting or bowling. He saw things very much in black and white, and if his motto was not exactly kill or be killed it certainly was about imposing your will on your opponent, rather than allowing him to do it to you. People often asked me then how I felt about bowling to a man like Cowdrey. For me, it made little difference. Partly due to my own self-confidence and largely due to Closey’s advice, I made a point of treating all batsmen alike, and I’m certain that I took Cowdrey’s wicket that day simply because I believed I could.
Tom Cartwright was the other major figure in my early development. Tom was an excellent all-rounder with Warwickshire, Somerset and England, and I think in many ways he saw me as a younger version of himself. It was Tom who was instrumental in helping me get my early chances with Somerset after he watched me in the nets at Millfield School, where he had been coaching. Against opposition from other influential figures within the county who saw me as just an average cricketer, Tom pushed my claims. He also saw how desperate I was to become an all-rounder, and my enthusiasm must have struck a chord. Without his help, my bowling might simply have been ignored, because the majority of judges had hardly considered it worthy of attention.
For instance, I will never forget, and I’m certain my father Les won’t either, the occasion of my first opportunity to impress at a national level, the English Schools’ Under-15 festival of 1971, staged in Liverpool. I had been selected to represent the South West and, naturally, Dad came with me. In the trial game to decide who would play for England Schools against the Public Schools at Aigburth, I produced what I thought was a telling performance with the ball only to later discover it had been a waste of effort. When I came on to bowl, I set a precise field in accordance with a tactical plan, and I enjoyed my first reward when I did the batsman through the air and had him caught at mid-wicket. When similar hard work earned a further five wickets, I left the field satisfied with my bowling and feeling confident that I would succeed in making the final XI.
Unbeknown to me, not for the first time and certainly not for the last, the selectors and I did not see eye-to-eye. In fact, their perception of what had taken place was entirely different. Les had been sitting close to them to see if he could pick up anything from their conversations, and when I took that first wicket he overheard one of these so-called experts comment: ‘Ignore that. It was a fluke’. Against such reasoning I had no chance of making the team and I was duly left out, primarily because they considered me a batsman rather than a bowler. I suppose they hadn’t ever heard of all-rounders. In the years that followed, whenever I managed to achieve anything on the cricket field, it gave me the greatest satisfaction to remember those blinkered observers and wonder what they were doing with their lives at that moment.
Les was fuming, and when the selectors added insult to injury by offering me the exalted role of substitute’s substitute, 13th man, he and I said ‘Thanks, but no thanks’ and promptly headed for Lime Street station.
Fortunately, Tom had seen enough to make a rather different judgement. He took me under his wing and taught me the art of swing bowling. He used to hang his head in despair sometimes when he saw me try to bounce people out, but in the end he believed in me enough to persevere. It was Tom who ensured that Somerset recommended me to Len Muncer, the chief coach of the Lord’s groundstaff boys, the nursery for young talent from all over the country. Tom also persuaded Somerset to give me a chance in a couple of Sunday league games at the end of the 1973 season. It was in the first of these, a televised match against Sussex at Hove, that I took a skyer in the deep to dismiss Tony Greig, a feat that played a large part in the club’s offer of a contract. It was just as well that Tom and Closey put in the effort they did, because, frankly, although it was an awful lot of fun, the education I received at Lord’s was mainly concerned with extending my repertoire of ways to skate on thin ice.
I thought Yeovil was a big town, but coming to Lord’s and London in 1971 really opened my eyes to the big bad world. When I first arrived in the ‘smoke’ I was the original yokel, sixteen years of age and totally naive to the realities of big city life. In short, my name was Ian Bumpkin.
The first thing that struck me about London was the fact that everything was still switched on at one or two in the morning. If you went to the West End at that time, there would be thousands of people milling around as if it were the middle of the afternoon. I just could not work it out. The first time I went into a strip club with the older groundstaff boys, I just stood there laughing in amazement at these women dancing about and taking their clothes off. I really had no idea this sort of thing went on. I had a lot to learn.
My first visit to Lord’s took place at the end of August 1971 when I travelled up with Mum for a trial. Marie sat in the rose garden behind the pavilion while I went off to try and prove what I could do. I remember bowling and batting quite well, but I was competing with lads who were considerably older than me. So I was quite surprised when they told me that they wanted me to start on the following Saturday. Before that, there was not much of the season left, but, at the end of it, I was invited back for the summer of 1972. There was still the winter to deal with so I returned to Somerset and the local labour exchange to look for work to tide me over. It wasn’t glamorous, but I’m proud to say I never went a week without finding something, and ironically I earned more in that six months than I did in my first cricket season with the county.
I didn’t mind the physical work, whether it was as a petrol-pump attendant, brickies’ labourer or plasterer’s mate, and I wonder how many of those who have since walked along the corridors of Yeovil General Hospital realize they are treading on my handiwork. Perhaps the most important aspect of these odd jobs was that they made me appreciate the cricket season all the more when it came, and made me even more determined that there was going to be more to my life than laying floor tiles.
When I arrived at Lord’s full-time, I had my first taste of the kind of ritualistic behaviour that is part and parcel of professional sport – the initiation ceremony. The older boys would come into the junior dressing room, grab the newcomer, pin him down and strip him, then coat his privates in whitewash. All very grown up, of course, but the fact is that your standing within the group was dependent on how well you resisted the assault. Although only sixteen, I was a bit of a handful even then. The first time it happened to me, it took about six of the boys to hold me down. So I was ‘in’. There was a lot of larking about, particularly on rainy days, and if any of my playing colleagues or opponents who became victims of my practical jokes later on want to know from where I got the idea of setting fire to newspapers while they were being read, or sticking chunks of fresh (and sometimes not so fresh) fruit or the occasional prawn in their batting gloves just before they went out to bat, they need wonder no more.
My big mate at the time was Rodney Ontong, who had arrived from East London near Johannesburg, South Africa. In many ways his home town was as much in the sticks as Yeovil had been, and as two country boys we immediately hit it off. We also shared the same confident attitude and approached cricket in an identical fashion – our motto was work hard on the pitch, then play hard afterwards. I would provide scrumpy from Yeovil and Onty would arrive with his suitcase loaded with South African brandy. It was a genuinely gruesome combination, but it did the job and the groundstaff Head Boy, Bill Jones, one of whose jobs, would you believe, was to ensure discipline in the ranks, would often be left to pick up the human debris at the end of the night’s entertainment. I soon learned all about the drinking games that you had to compete in if you wanted to be part of the social scene: the yards of ale, the boat races and the like. I had sampled beer before coming to Lord’s, but it was only when I formed my partnership with Onty that I really started to get the taste.
The only difference between us was that he managed to toe the line better than me when it came to discipline. He would make sure that he stayed on-side with the coaches, Len Muncer and his assistant Harry Sharp. But I struggled with Len, who was one of the military school of cricketers, with razor-sharp creases in his flannels and immaculate shoes. What annoyed me most was that he had decided very early on that I couldn’t bowl. That was absurd because Somerset had sent me up as an all-rounder, not just a batsman who could bowl a bit. I wanted to be in the game as much as possible and Len’s resistance was a pain in the neck.
Most of my bowling was done in the nets, not only for practice but also because it was the place to escape from some of the more mundane tasks that were part of the job. By falling out with Len, however, I lost out on one of the perks.
At weekends when MCC teams were playing up and down the country, they would more often than not find themselves a player or two short. So they would send to Lord’s for a member of the groundstaff who would then not only have his expenses paid but would also enjoy a free lunch and tea. From one match you could end up making as much as the £12 we were paid per week. Len controlled the list of who went where and unfortunately, because of our differences, I was hardly ever selected for one of these trips.
The bottom line was that Len didn’t have much time for me because he felt I was too brash and over-confident. He may even have been right. I probably didn’t do myself much good in his eyes when on one occasion my desire to prove myself in this fiercely competitive world led to me breaking convention. I was going through a bad patch at the time with my batting and when we came up against a weak side from the City of London school, I failed to follow the normal tradition of giving your wicket away, preferably in a suitably subtle manner, on reaching fifty. I went on to make a hundred instead, and after leaving the field to stony silence I was taken to one side by Len and given a fearful ear-bashing. His attitude antagonised me no end but, to be fair to him, he did tell my parents that he was surprised I was not being called back to play for Somerset seconds during that year.
Harry Sharp, nicknamed the ‘admiral’ because he had been an able seaman during the war and who became the Middlesex scorer when he packed up coaching, was different and I always made a point of keeping in touch with him. He would stand behind the net when I was batting, with half a fag stuck behind his ear, and deliver his verdict.
‘Bloody awful shot, Botham … but if you keep hitting it son, you keep playing it.’
The £12 weekly wage did not go far after rent and bills. We were paid on Thursday and by Sunday would be broke. So to stay alive, we got up to the usual tricks like jumping the barriers on the tube, and we soon developed a few key dodges to supplement our meagre income. We never got involved in anything seriously criminal, it was more of an initiative test. One of these, the Great Seat Cushion Scam, was our chief money-maker. It worked like this: Step One – arrive at the ground early. Step Two – divert a number of seat cushions, say 50 to 100 from the normal selling positions to the little booths where we worked selling scorecards. Step Three – when handing over a scorecard to spectators arriving at the ground, offer cushions at 5p rather than the normal 10p hire charge. Call me Al Capone.
The cushiest number was delivering updated scorecards to the offices all around the ground. That meant constant access to the pavilion, and more importantly, to the kitchens where the ‘legendary’ Nancy Doyle would slip us poor starving waifs the odd bacon butty. Rodney and I even found a way to make some spending money while gargling at the same time. Working behind the Tavern Bar during match days offered excellent opportunities for spirits, not to mention pints, of free enterprise. Basically the trick was that whenever a group of businessmen arrived we made sure they received our undivided attention. Slowly but surely they ended up paying a bit more for each round of drinks, and, of course, the more they imbibed the less they cared. Needless to say, offers of ‘and one for yourself’ were never knowingly refused. After a couple of hours of this we would be staggering around the place, parrot-faced, making a complete cock-up of the orders and ringing up totals that bore absolutely no resemblance to the actual cost of the drinks. When this exercise in creative accounting was performed once too often, Rod and I were given a new order – of the boot.
Another potential opportunity for cash prizes was the job of bowling at MCC members in the nets. The ones we targeted for special treatment were known as the ‘Jazz Hats’. These were the flash harrys who turned up in their sports cars with all the latest gear that always looked fresh out of the wrapper. The call would come through, Bill Jones would ask the name of the member and if he decided the man in question was not a big enough tipper for him to bother with, he would delegate accordingly.
The method for finding out what kind of tip you might pick up was tried and trusted. After bowling for five minutes or so and supplying a comfortable number of half-volleys, it would be time to adjust your aim towards the thigh pocket. If you heard the tell-tale jingle of change, there was not much point in continuing the drudgery for too long and it was the signal to start bringing the session to a close with a few quicker deliveries. If you heard no sound at all, there were two possibilities. You were either breaking your back for a tight bastard who carried nothing, or a gent who carried only notes. As you didn’t want to risk missing out on the latter, a lot of players who barely knew which end of a bat to pick up suddenly found themselves middling the ball like world-beaters, hearing exclamations of wonder at their superb strokeplay and astonishment that they were not representing their county at the very least. If the fellow in question turned out to have short arms and deep pockets, however, the next time he turned up it would be open warfare.
The groundstaff team was known as the Nippers, and whenever we played away we would make sure to feed well during the tea interval. It was comical to watch the lads stuffing chicken legs, vol-au-vents, sandwiches, pork pies and anything else they could lay their hands on into their kit bags. The only thing you had to make sure of was clearing out the bag from time to time; sweaty jockstraps and rotting pork pies often made a potent combination. The matches were taken reasonably seriously, but if the opposition was not particularly strong everyone understood that once a decent game of cricket had been had by all, the main priority was to get to the bar as soon as possible. For the home matches we were aided and abetted by an umpire called John Collins. You could tell when the pub doors were opening because his decisions would become more and more outrageous. As the shadows lengthened, any appeals for caught behind or lbw became a mere formality.
By and large I managed to keep out of big trouble during my time at Lord’s. The nearest I came to it was an incident involving a water jug and one of the juniors, a lad called Anwar Muhammad who was a cousin or nephew, I can’t recall which, of the Pakistan Test player Younis Ahmed. It was a wet, miserable day and I decided the dressing room boredom needed to be lifted with a bit of horseplay. I picked up the jug intending to give the lad a soaking and as I went to throw the water, the handle came clean away and the whole thing shattered. Anwar Muhammad nearly lost a finger and I was cut around the wrist. There was blood everywhere and an ambulance was called for. I think it was only the seriousness of the injuries that saved us from strife.
The pleas of ‘accident’, however, failed to save Onty and me from being evicted from our digs. The landlady was a classic of the genre, with big thick glasses through which she was not inclined to see the funny side. She scared me witless. The problem arose during one of our regular games of football in the passageway when Rodney let fly with a magnificent unstoppable volley. Dipping and swerving at the last minute, it smashed through the window and into the road outside. Enter the Dragon.
We were well behind with the rent and had received several warnings, so it was bags-in-the-street time. Luckily, it was near the end of the season so we were able to doss down on the floor of some friends and then, once we had outstayed our welcome, we had to resort to sleeping at the ground. Security was minimal so we managed to sneak in and kip in the baths in the juniors’ changing rooms.
At this stage little thought was given to the possible consequences of our actions. Although the cricket was taken seriously, we were living for the moment without a care in the world. Soon, however, the attractions of London began to wear thin and I was glad to get away from the place. I was impatient and I wanted to break through into the county circuit.
I was due to return to Lord’s for the whole of the summer of 1973, but in the event I spent hardly any time there because during that season I became a regular in the Somerset second team.
The young players were being introduced into the senior team gradually so it was never a case of club cricketer one day, pro the next. There was a definite pecking order and the junior players had to know their place. It amazed me in later years to watch fresh-faced seventeen-year-olds march in on the first day and demand: ‘Where’s the sponsored car?’ In those days you did as you were told and kept your mouth shut. If you failed to observe this simple rule, there was every chance that one of the senior players would take it upon himself to point out the error of your ways, normally by grabbing you by the scruff of the neck and pinning you against the nearest available wall.
I made a conscious decision when I got into the first team to play the part of the dumb country boy. (Hands up those who said it shouldn’t have been difficult.) While I was perceived as such I was no bother to anyone, more a figure of fun, and it made me laugh to see some of the other youngsters getting in over their heads. I would think to myself, ‘You silly lad, you’ll pay for that sometime’, and sure enough most of them did. Because the rest of the team thought I didn’t have a brain cell in my head, there was never any danger of me being asked for an opinion on club politics, which meant I could just concentrate on playing and going for a beer afterwards – and that suited me down to the ground.
Quietly, though, I had already sorted out my objectives. Priority number one was to get in the team, then stay there. From there, the target was a county cap. And next, even at this stage, was England.
First there was the little matter of finding a place to live. My initial fixed abode was in Greenway Road, Taunton, where I was billeted with Dennis Breakwell, the slow left-arm bowler who had recently joined us from Northamptonshire. It was called a club flat, but there is no doubt that the term ‘flat’ definitely represented a breach of the Trade Descriptions Act. Not to put too fine a point on it, it was a complete tip: even the cockroaches passed by on the other side of the street because some of its unique features would have tested the descriptive talents of the most imaginative estate agent. First, it was so damp that there were fish jumping out of the wall. Then, due to the fact that the mod cons had been cut off from the previous summer, there was no electricity or water. We did have the luxury of a toilet but it happened to be situated outside, and flushing it could only be achieved by the skilful application of a bucket of water. The only heating we had was created by burning newspapers and old rubbish. There were no cooking facilities so we made sure to get our fill at the ground or to raid the milk float that clattered down the street in the early morning. It was not the sort of place we looked forward to returning to at the end of the day, so more often than not we didn’t. We spent most of our evenings in the Gardener’s Arms, not just to be sociable but also to have a roof over our heads and a bit of warmth and light.
Here, the most useful aspect of my training at Lord’s was put to good use. When it came to the challenge of sinking three pints in a minute, no one could touch me. At closing time it was off to a club, either the Camelot or the 88-400, or back to play cards by candlelight. We kipped in sleeping bags on the floor. Luxury. Fortunately by the start of my breakthrough season in 1974 the situation had improved somewhat. My salary had been doubled – to £500 per annum – and Dennis and I found a new flat, in St James Street, right next to the county ground. We also had a new flat-mate, Viv Richards.
Viv and I had hit it off the first time we met, when we had been selected to play for Somerset Under-25s against Glamorgan at the Lansdowne Cricket Club. The grapevine had already been humming with stories of the young West Indian, and when we bumped into each other I found that he had also heard of me. The moment he dropped his bag on the dressing room floor something clicked between us and that bond has remained ever since. What also helped to break the ice was the fact that our performances in that match represented a spectacular reversal of roles. Viv, the great batting hope, was bowled first ball but then redeemed himself by taking five for 25. Yours truly, who was busy boring everyone to tears with tales of my brilliant bowling, chucked down a lot of old rubbish then scored a century. Afterwards I said to him: ‘Listen, Viv. You take the wickets. I’ll score the runs’.
Even then, Viv was totally committed to succeeding. He later said that what struck him about me in those early days was my total belief in myself and the fact that I was always positive. What impressed me was that there was never any danger that he was not going to make full use of his immense talent. He had the best eye of any cricketer I have ever seen, and he said he felt that any moment of the match when he was not batting was wasted. I think that came from his childhood experiences of playing beach cricket on his native island of Antigua. He told me once about his childhood, and how on the beach he would be one of a huge crowd of kids waiting for their turn to bat. If you got out, it was quite possible you would not get another chance for days, so you did everything you could to stay in. I respected his near-obsession, but although I was also single-minded about succeeding I didn’t go quite so far as he did in those early days. While he would actually sleep with his bat by the bed, my sleeping companion was a bottle of gin.
These were heady days but things were also close to getting out of hand. The early successes were marvellous, of course, but with them came local fame, and with that some local aggro. I had been in my fair share of scraps at school but the more successful I was on the cricket field, the more the so-called hard men of life wanted to have a pop at me. When I went out to a pub with friends, there would always be the one comedian who insisted on proving to his mates that he was tougher than me, and I had difficulty coming to terms with that. Where some people could just count to ten and walk away, I had difficulty getting past one. I was never one of those who could turn the other cheek; it was always an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
Although later incidents were to have wider-reaching implications, and one almost cost me the chance of captaining England in 1980/81, the first I recall clearly took place in Taunton when Dennis and I were returning home after a few pints at a local club. Suddenly, these two youths appeared from nowhere. One of them dived over a wall at me, grabbed a chunk of hair from the back of my head and ripped it clean away. I have no idea why he did this and I wasn’t going to waste time asking questions or wait for him to pull a knife or bottle. I knocked seven bells out of him in about 30 seconds while Dennis kept his mate occupied by telling him: ‘If you want any trouble, pal, you can have it’.
Viv was also a very handy man in a crisis. I could not bear the kind of racist remarks people would sometimes come out with when he was around. Viv was already a tough person, but I think his early experiences hardened him even more. Later, when on more than one occasion he was abused by idiots in the crowd at Headingley, it still hurt him deeply which was why both he and I were so thrilled by the reception he received when he bowed out from Test cricket in the final match of the 1991 series with England at The Oval. As he walked out to bat in his last innings, the crowd gave him a standing ovation all the way to the wicket. At the end of his knock of 60, during which he had established a career Test batting average of over 50, they did exactly the same thing on the way back to the dressing room. Halfway back he stopped, turned and acknowledged the gesture by raising his bat to all sides and doffing the maroon cap of the West Indies that meant so much to him. It was one of the great moments of cricket, and I consider it a privilege to have been there on the field at the time.
I recall one early example of the kind of man he is. We were in the 88-400 club and Viv was standing at the bar when he overheard two blokes discussing whether it really was Ian Botham they were looking at. Eventually the bet was struck: for £10 one of them was to walk across and stand on my foot. I was blissfully unaware of what was going on even though a man I had never met had come and practically camped on my shoes, but when he returned to the bar to collect his winnings, Viv stopped him and said: ‘My friend seems to be a bit dead tonight. How about dealing with a live person?’
As time passed, the closeness of my relationship with Viv caused some problems between Kath and I because she complained, with some justification, that it seemed as though I was closer to him than I was to her. Living, eating, drinking, batting and bowling together over a period of years, it was inevitable that we grew to know each other inside out, better even I think than we knew our wives or our wives knew us. But that was all in the future. At this stage my meeting with my future spouse was still some way off. In fact, it came about as a direct result of Andy Roberts rearranging my teeth.
