Читать книгу Botham’s Century: My 100 great cricketing characters - Ian Botham, Ian Botham - Страница 23

Long after I knocked back Colin Cowdrey’s off-stump as an 18-year-old in a Gillette Cup semi-final, it finally dawned on me: I had bowled one of the greatest ambassadors world cricket has ever known.

I was brought up by my old Somerset captain Brian Close to treat all batsmen alike, and never to be overawed by great reputations taking guard at the other end. All the same, it was a great feather in my cap when I won my personal duel with ‘Kipper’ – later to become Sir Colin Cowdrey, and then Lord Cowdrey of Tonbridge – at Canterbury that afternoon in August 1974.

Sadly for me, there was to be no happy ending, or a trip to Lord’s: Kent won by three wickets and went on to beat Lancashire in a low-scoring final. But to be confronted by one of the game’s great names, and rearrange his off-stump, was a special moment.

Later in my career, I was fortunate enough to get to know Kipper pretty well. We used to enjoy the odd game of golf, and he was as much fun off the pitch as he was an exemplary character on it. It was a terrible moment when, two days before England’s fantastic win at Karachi in December 2000, his son Chris was awakened in the middle of the night with the tragic news that Lord Cowdrey had passed away, and Chris had to fly home from Pakistan.

Just four months earlier, I’d been photographed at Old Trafford with five of the other six Englishmen to reach 100 Test caps: Geoffrey Boycott, David Gower, Alec Stewart, Mike Atherton and Graham Gooch. Colin, the first man to reach that milestone, was unable to attend because he was recovering from a stroke at the time. But to me, he will always be the leader of the magnificent seven.

Colin’s love of the game and his conviction that, no matter how high the stakes, it should be played the right way, encouraged him to become the driving force behind a move to define ‘the spirit of the game’ and have a statement describing it written and included in the laws of cricket. It hurt him deeply when cricketers let themselves down on the field with poor behaviour. And I shudder to think what he would have made of some of what went on during England’s tour to Sri Lanka, or when England took on Pakistan at the start of the 2001 summer.

But while his work as an administrator may bear fruit in the long run, it was his skill as a player that made him one of the best-loved figures in the world game. As a batsman, he was one of the most graceful of any era. His textbook cover drive was a work of art: his timing was so immaculate that he appeared to caress the ball to the boundary. With Peter May, he shared a partnership of 411 against the West Indies at Edgbaston in 1957 which still remains England’s record stand for any wicket in Test matches.

He was also a man of extraordinary courage, and the way he walked out to bat with his broken left arm in plaster at Lord’s in 1963, to save the game when England were nine wickets down against the Windies, is part of cricket folklore. He thought it was all a jolly jape, of course, and he stood at the non-striker’s end for the last over, beaming like a Cheshire cat. On the only occasion I can remember talking to him about it, he told me he would have batted left-handed – using only his right arm – if he’d been called upon to face the bowling.

Only a few months after I’d dismissed him at Canterbury, I can also remember Colin marching out to face Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson – at their ferocious peak – in Perth on the 1974–75 Ashes tour, where he’d been summoned as an emergency replacement for England’s vast platoon of walking wounded. Thommo greeted him with a few snarls, as you would expect, but Colin just doffed his cap and chortled, ‘Good day, I don’t believe we’ve met – the name’s Cowdrey’

At the end of that over, he wandered up the pitch for a chat with his batting partner David Lloyd, like two neighbours chatting over the garden fence. ‘Bumble’ had been ducking Thommo’s 99 mph bouncers on a trampoline pitch for dear life, and was somewhat taken aback when Colin, approaching his 42nd birthday, greeted him with the words, ‘This is rather good fun, isn’t it?’ Bumble replied that he’d been in funnier situations, but together they knuckled down to put on 50-odd runs against some of the fastest bowling ever seen. If Cowdrey had a fault, those who played under him as captain will tell you that he suffered occasionally from bouts of indecision brought on by a totally unwarranted lack of self-confidence. When, during the fourth Test of England’s 1968 tour to the West Indies, Gary Sobers threw down the gauntlet to England by offering them a target of 215 in two-and-three-quarter hours, Colin was so unsure as to whether to go for the runs that it was only the combined efforts of Ken Barrington, Basil D’Oliveira and Tom Graveney at tea on that final day that persuaded him to do so. In the end, Cowdrey made 71, and England won the match and the series 1–0. Mind you, according to Colin, leading the side, though a tremendous honour, was by no means a driving ambition. Later in his life when he reviewed the circumstances that led to him being given the captaincy, after Brian Close had been sacked following a time-wasting controversy in county cricket, he admitted, ‘I felt as if I had come third in an egg-and-spoon race at school and been awarded the prize because the first two had been disqualified.’

Cowdrey was enormously proud in 1988 when Chris, the eldest of his three sons, completed only the second father-and-son captaincy double for England, after Frank and George Mann. But he showed just as much compassion towards others who held the post, and I remember getting a phone call from him when things weren’t going so well for me as England skipper. He told me to keep my chin up and, coming from a man of his stature in the game, that meant a lot to me. Pats on the back and complimentary headlines are par for the course when results are good on the pitch, but it’s at the lowest points when you find out who your real friends are in cricket – and Kipper showed his true colours with that phone call. I know Mike Atherton, for one, also used to receive supportive messages from Cowdrey during the more troubled phases of his reign as England captain, and that’s a measure of the man.

Somehow it was appropriate that in the week English cricket lost one of its most celebrated characters, Atherton should score a match-winning century in Karachi, and England should mark Cowdrey’s passing with one of their best victories of modern times.