Like Steve Ovett, Botham saw himself as an ordinary man misunderstood and mistreated by a patrician Establishment. His father had spent twenty years with the Fleet Air Arm before taking a job at the Westland helicopter firm; his mother had worked as a volunteer nurse during the war before starting a family. Born in 1955, young Ian grew up in a semi-detached house in Yeovil and went to the local comprehensive school. His parents were intensely patriotic, a legacy of their wartime service, as was their son. ‘He sings the national anthem with his hand on his heart,’ explained one of Botham’s friends. ‘He’s incredibly, unbelievably, patriotic. He celebrates St George’s Day and he’s a huge monarchist. If there was a war tomorrow, he’d sign up to defend his country.’26
A fine cricketer as a boy, Botham left school at 16 to work as a junior member of the ground staff at Lord’s, though his dream was to play for his local county, Somerset. Even at this stage, he was a young man of very traditional views. At a time when many youngsters were delaying getting married until their late twenties, he proposed to his girlfriend, Kathy, when he was just 18. They were married two years later and settled down in her native Lincolnshire, where he could pursue his dream of a rural life ‘defined by family and friends, domesticated animals and rolling acres’. Even as a parent, he prided himself on being ‘a bit old fashioned’. He voted for Mrs Thatcher’s party in 1979 and never wavered in his loyalty. ‘I do believe in free enterprise,’ he told a group of Scottish sixth-formers a few years later. ‘And I do believe that if a guy gets off his backside and wants to go out and try to make something of his life, he should have that opportunity. Unfortunately, under the Labour Party … I feel it would be too easy for people to sit down and do nothing and get paid for it.’27
Like many working-class Conservatives, Botham was at once fiercely proud of his background and very sensitive to criticism from his more privileged peers. His biographer points out that, despite his apparent self-confidence, he had a ‘deep-seated anxiety for acceptance’. Unfortunately, English cricket was still run by an upper-crust elite, with whom Botham never felt entirely comfortable. His predecessor as England captain, Mike Brearley, had been educated at the City of London School and Cambridge, while even at Somerset there were plenty of public schoolboys, such as Peter Roebuck (Millfield and Cambridge) and Vic Marks (Blundell’s and Oxford). When Marks described Botham as a ‘hooligan in the nicest sense of the word’, he meant it affectionately. Yet this surely explains why Botham was drawn to outsiders like Somerset’s young West Indian batsman Viv Richards, who became one of his closest friends in the game. At one point Botham even copied Richards’s habit of wearing Rastafarian wristbands, a sign of his self-image as an underdog.28
When Botham took his first steps in the early 1970s, some coaches saw him merely as a slogger. But his sheer competitiveness set him apart. Viv Richards thought Botham ‘made himself into a great player’ through pure determination, ignoring the ‘mumbo-jumbo’ of the coaches and playing with untutored freedom. Later, Botham told The Times that, unlike many cricketers, he never tried to analyse his technique. ‘You’ve got to enjoy it, let it go, let it speak for itself,’ he said. ‘It’s basically a very simple game: three sticks stuck in the ground, a ball to knock them down, a big stick to protect them by hitting the ball.’29
By 1977 Botham’s youthful heroics had caught the attention of the England selectors, and he soon became a fixture of the national side. To the public, he seemed an effervescent all-rounder unburdened by the fear of failure: in twenty Tests between the summer of 1978 and the spring of 1980, he scored 1,099 runs and took 112 wickets. In one unstoppable performance in Bombay in February 1980, he scored 114 runs in a single innings and took thirteen wickets, a combination unprecedented in Test history. To the press, he seemed a force of nature, a ‘colossus’, a rampaging lion in all his glory. ‘BIONIC BOTHAM!’ roared the Daily Mirror, reporting that he had ‘scythed through India’s ranks’ to send the ‘little men from the East’ packing. By now he was more than just another cricketer. He was a phenomenon, so well known that the Mirror’s women’s page ran a long profile of him and his wife Kathy. Apparently without irony, the headline described him as ‘The Perfect Husband’.30
Botham was not perfect. Right from the start, profiles noted that he could be brash and aggressive, and was never shy of using his fists. But after a decade of sporting sterility, the papers were delighted to see somebody with a bit of spirit. Botham was ‘wholly a fighter’, said the Express in 1978, reporting that on a club tour of Australia the young Somerset all-rounder had ‘physically cleared’ a bar of local supporters. As the Observer’s Hugh McIlvanney remarked, Botham had ‘a vitality which often appears to compare with that of ordinary men as Niagara does with a bathroom tap’, even if it ended in punch-ups worthy of a Western saloon. When he first toured Pakistan, he got into a fight with the cricket correspondent of the Sun after drinks at the British High Commission in Islamabad. On subsequent tours, records his biographer, he invariably ‘shoved people into swimming pools … singed their hair with cigarette lighters, and, with breathtaking predictability, turned up to Christmas fancy-dress parties as a gorilla’.31
Botham’s gorilla costume was aptly chosen. At a time when the newspapers were full of men in make-up and women in trousers, he was an old-fashioned, red-blooded alpha male. He liked hunting, shooting, fishing and drinking. He expected Kathy to stay at home and look after their children, and freely admitted that he was not a hands-on father. Interviewed about his parenting skills, he said cheerfully: ‘I had a few backhanders in my time. It didn’t do me any harm. Children must obey their parents. That is what is lacking in a lot of the youth today.’ Profiles invariably came back to Botham’s unreconstructed masculinity, all the more bracing when the same papers were running stories about the GLC women’s committee or Duran Duran’s taste in mascara. McIlvanney, for example, marvelled at his ‘vast thighs’, ‘thick, impressive torso’ and powerful forearms, ‘huge, flexible slabs of bone and muscle’. Even his Somerset teammate Peter Roebuck, who thought him ‘a very nice and generous man’, added that he was ‘like an animal hunting’ – and, of course, ‘a man’s man’.32
To the tabloids, all this made Botham irresistible. He was a great character, a man of immense physical courage and commitment, who wore his heart on his sleeve, fought until the sweat streamed from his brow and would gladly have shed his blood for his country. It was no wonder that he became a columnist for the Sun, where he joined other populist rebels such as the footballers George Best and Jimmy Greaves, the showjumper Harvey Smith and the wrestler Mick McManus. Even his nickname, ‘Beefy’, might have been chosen specifically to cement his reputation as a national hero who could have stood beside Wolfe at Quebec or Nelson at Trafalgar. Some of his teammates referred to him simply as ‘Beef’. And it was only too tempting to imagine him roaring out the chorus of Henry Fielding’s ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’ (1731) after smashing the foreign foe for six:
Oh! The Roast Beef of old England,
And old English Roast Beef!33
*
In the summer of 1980, Botham’s career reached its apogee, as the selectors appointed him England’s youngest captain for almost a century. Almost immediately there were mutters that he was too exuberant, too cocky, a great individualist rather than a leader of men. Above all, his critics warned that he was too immature, a rebel never far from flying off the handle. Yet Botham never doubted that he was the right man to lead his country. ‘All through my career people have been saying that I’m too young … too young to do this, too young to do that,’ he said defiantly. ‘Let’s wait and see just what happens.’34
What happened was worse than anybody could have imagined. England played six Tests against the West Indies and Australia in 1980, and failed to win one. ‘Perhaps it was a mistake to push him into the deep end,’ said an editorial in The Times. Then, in the spring of 1981, Botham took his team to the Caribbean for five more Tests against the West Indies. It
was an utter disaster. One match was cancelled after the Guyanese government objected to England’s Robin Jackman, who had played in South Africa. The other four went ahead, but again England failed to win a match, losing two and drawing two. By now Botham’s teammates were losing confidence in their leader. Some complained that he was still trying to be ‘one of the lads’; others muttered that he was training less and had put on weight. At the airport on the way home, seething with frustration, he lashed out at the BBC’s Henry Blofeld. The other cricket writers agreed to draw a veil over it, but the Sunday People got hold of the story and ran it on the front page.35
Off the field, the captaincy did Botham no good at all. In December 1980 he was banned from driving after the police had intercepted him doing 120 m.p.h. on the way to a team meeting before his first Test as captain. His solicitor explained that he had been a ‘little bit excited’. Two weeks later, Botham was on a night out in Scunthorpe when he got into a scuffle with a teenage seaman who was annoyed that Botham did not want his autograph.fn4 To cut a long story short, the seaman went to the police and Botham was charged with assault, though the trial collapsed when the jury failed to reach a verdict. Given that the England captain was expected to be a pillar of Corinthian sportsmanship, the publicity was dreadful. Even one of Botham’s greatest champions, The Times’s veteran correspondent John Woodcock, lamented that he had ‘confirmed the worst fears of those who felt that at the tender age of 24 it was too much for him’.36
The summer of 1981, therefore, found Botham under horrendous pressure. His form had collapsed under the weight of responsibility, his batting average down from more than 40 runs to barely 14. To journalists he seemed deeply unhappy. ‘Having been glad when he got the job,’ wrote Woodcock, ‘I would be sorry now to see him keep it.’ But there was no let-up. On 18 June, England were due to begin the defence of the Ashes against their deadliest rivals, Australia. Amid intense speculation, the selectors announced that Botham would captain the side in the first Test at Trent Bridge, but not necessarily in the rest of the series. ‘One Test is better than none at all,’ he told the press. ‘If we win the match there will be no pressure. But anyway, pressure never bothers me.’ This was patently not true. Morale in the England camp was at rock bottom, and the players no longer bothered with drills or meetings, which Botham regarded as pointless. The selectors, wrote the Express’s Alan Thompson, ‘have piled the pressure on Botham to such a degree that if he does not win the Trent Bridge Test single handed either with bat or ball or by captaincy he could be out on his ear’.37
Botham did not come close to winning the Trent Bridge Test, single-handed or otherwise. In miserably damp weather, he scored just 1 and 33, took just three wickets, dropped three catches and watched in listless confusion as the Australians ground out a narrow victory. Afterwards, Kathy urged him to step down, but the selectors decided to give him a last chance in the second Test at Lord’s. Botham proclaimed himself ‘delighted’ and insisted that he still had the backing of ‘the man in the street’. But Fleet Street saw matters differently. On 2 July, the opening day of the Lord’s Test, the Evening Standard’s headline read: ‘Botham Must Go’.38
The fates were not with him. At Lord’s, where the match petered out into a drab draw, Botham scored 0 and 0. When he walked back to the pavilion after his second duck, the Marylebone Cricket Club’s patrician members did not even look him in the eye. ‘It was the feeling of being deserted which affected me so deeply,’ he remembered. ‘I’ve never felt as lonely as I did that day.’ Nobody doubted that Botham was finished. He had led England twelve times without a victory, the worst record of any captain in Test history. When the match was over, the chairman of the selectors, Alec Bedser, took him aside. They agreed that Botham would tell the press he had resigned, but as the next day’s papers gleefully reported, Bedser was going to give him the boot anyway. Kathy complained that her husband had been ‘crucified’ by the press. But the Express was not in a forgiving mood: ‘It was inevitable that Ian Botham went. He should not have been made captain in the first place.’39
Botham’s humiliation seemed a symptom of a wider malaise. The late 1970s had been atrocious years for Britain’s established team sports. In football, England’s manager Don Revie had controversially defected to the United Arab Emirates. In cricket, England’s captain Tony Greig had been sacked after secretly recruiting players for Kerry Packer’s breakaway World Series Cricket. By these standards, for Botham to lose his position because of mere ineptitude was barely a story at all.
And in a broader context, his fall from grace was only too predictable. Britain was a country in which people were always falling from grace: a country, said the tabloids, in which nothing worked properly, the governing class had lost their backbone, the workers were always on strike and anyone with any ambition had long since jumped ship. On top of all that, Botham’s fall came at the very moment when his political heroine’s popularity was at an all-time low and her dream of national revival seemed to have turned into a living nightmare. In an excruciating accident of timing, the second Test coincided with the riots in Toxteth and Southall, which meant the news of Botham’s resignation was literally juxtaposed with images of the inner cities burning. On one front page, the headlines read ‘NEW RIOTS HIT LONDON’ and ‘I QUIT! SKIPPER BOTHAM BEATS THE AXE’. Another had ‘SPOILS OF A LOOTER’ and ‘BOTHAM’S AGONY’. In essence they were aspects of the same story: the sad, embittered decline of a country that had once led the world, and had now become its whipping boy.40
And then: resurrection.
Even decades later, the story of the third Test at Headingley, which began nine days after Botham’s humiliation, seems scarcely believable. As captain, the selectors brought back his predecessor, the cerebral Mike Brearley, while Botham returned to being one of the boys. Yet for the first three days, it was the same old story. In the damp gloom of a Yorkshire summer, Australia kicked off with a solid 401. England responded with a derisory 174, which meant they had to bat again immediately. Only once in history had any Test side recovered from such an abject start, and it seemed highly unlikely to happen again. By teatime on day three, a Saturday, Ladbrokes were quoting 500–1 for an England victory. To cap it all, when the umpires abandoned play early because of bad light, the spectators threw cushions on to the pitch in protest, and some even barged into the pavilion to harangue the officials. The Observer thought it had been a ‘bitter let-down’; the Sun’s headline read simply: ‘PATHETIC!’ In other words, it had been a typical English day out.41
That night, Botham, who had scored a respectable 50 in the first innings, invited both teams to a barbecue at his Lincolnshire cottage. Sunday was a rest day, so England’s players stayed up into the small hours, drowning their sorrows. On Monday battle resumed at Headingley, though not until after Botham and some of his teammates had checked out of their Leeds hotel, since they knew defeat was certain. By mid-afternoon, England were on 135 for 7, still some 92 runs behind Australia’s first-innings total. With Botham the only vaguely decent England batsman still standing, the match was drifting towards the inevitable conclusion.
At this point, Botham was joined at the crease by Graham Dilley, a young fast bowler who had played poorly and was sure he was going to be dropped. With nothing to lose, Dilley came out swinging. In seventy-five balls he scored a stunning 56, including nine fours, and his enthusiasm proved contagious. As his captain amusedly recalled, there was nothing Botham liked more than some old-fashioned ‘village-green slogging’. So he began to bash the ball as only he could, hitting twenty-seven fours and a six. He rode his luck, of course; but suddenly he was his old self again, relaxed, almost insouciant, free from the cares of the last few months. At last, Dilley fell; then Chris Old put on another 29 and Bob Willis another 2, while all the time Botham walloped away like a teenager in the nets. By the time England were all out, early the following morning, he had scored 149 not out. In the pavilion, the photographer Adrian Murrell captured him, still padded u
p, his hair tousled with sweat, apparently deep in thought and about to light a cigar. For the first time in two years, he looked like a man at peace.42
Even after Botham’s heroics, victory seemed unlikely. The Australians needed only 130 to win. When play began on the fifth day, there were barely 2,000 people in a ground holding some 16,000, and the Australian batsmen seemed perfectly capable of handling the pressure. Not long before lunch, they were on 56 for 1, and heading for victory. Then Brearley told his gangling, shaggy-haired bowler Bob Willis to bowl downhill, as fast as possible. Three wickets followed before lunch, and with the score 58 for 4, there was a palpable shift in the momentum. By two o’clock, the mood was running in England’s favour. The Australians, once so certain of success, were wobbling; the stands were filling up; the English players had an unaccustomed spring in their step. And with Willis raining down missile after missile, and the Australians in a state of panic, the impossible began to look distinctly probable. Suddenly it was 68 for 6, then 74 for 7, then 75 for 8. Later, there were stories of people gathering outside high-street electronics shops, hypnotized by the prospect of the unlikeliest victory in England’s history.
At last, shortly before half-past two, Willis fired another deadly ball down the wicket and Ray Bright’s middle stump exploded out of the ground. It was all over: Australia were all out for 111, and England – joyously, impossibly, gloriously – had won by 18 runs. On television, the pictures showed hundreds of delighted youngsters pouring on to the field, while England’s players ran for the safety of the pavilion. Beneath the changing rooms, a small crowd chanted ‘England!’ and sang ‘Jerusalem’. At last, to roars from the crowd, the players reappeared, wreathed in smiles. The man of the match award, inevitably, went to Botham. The crowd, equally inevitably, sang: ‘There’s only one Ian Botham.’43
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