Читать книгу Botham’s Century: My 100 great cricketing characters - Ian Botham, Ian Botham - Страница 27

In a cricketing context, the name John Davies is probably not widely known. But John is one of the most significant characters in the Botham story, for he is the man who added five years to my playing career. Without him, my back injury would have finished me as early as 1988.

It may surprise some people to learn that my back problem was first diagnosed ten years before that, during my first Ashes tour in the winter of 1978–79. I was just 23 years old with a dozen or so Test matches under my belt when I started to feel odd pains in my lower back. Just as a precaution, I was shipped off to hospital for X-rays, and when the specialist called me in to show me what he had found, I got the shock of my life. There was a deformity of the spine, he told me. The problem was at stage one, he said. When it gets to stage three, you’re in trouble, he said.

Deformity of the spine? Stage one, stage three? He wasn’t talking about me, was he? I’ve no idea whether that is normal in such cases or not, or whether I was just born lucky, but I was too young, too keen and had too much ambition to allow myself to be sidetracked. It was a case of mind over matter. The back was going to have to take whatever punishment was in store. So, from then on, I treated the occasional spot of early-morning stiffness as simply that, and put the gloomy prognosis out of my thoughts and I’m happy to say that the condition stayed at stage two for the next ten years.