Heroes and Contemporaries (Text Only). David Gower
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player who hasn’t played Test cricket among my Heroes and Contemporaries has been prevented from doing so only by politics. He has long had the ability to play Test cricket and he certainly qualifies as a hero.
I have tried to make this book about men rather than about cricketers. Fascinating as the game’s statistics can be and an endless source of trivia for quizmasters and the like, they are far from being the best judgement on a player and give no insight into a man’s character or circumstances. Only, for instance, in the last few years, as biographers have burrowed beneath Edwardian records, have some of the great men of the Golden Age appeared as their contemporaries knew them.
The likes of Boycott and Botham will live forever in the record books, and I am by no means the first observer to try to unravel and explain their complex personalities. I have had the advantage of seeing them in the privacy of the dressing-room, and hope not to have abused that privilege but instead to have used it to good purpose.
The style is, I hope, relaxed and readable. I hope too that the book includes what may be a few new stories about some of your favourite cricketers, and that your enjoyment of them matches the time spent in composing what follows.
(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