Botham: My Autobiography

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‘Right’, said Ted. ‘Now look, lads, when you get in the bath tonight, I want you to sing this at the top of your voices.’

I thought to myself ‘What the hell is going on? Whatever he’s drinking, I’ll have a pint!’ I had played upwards of 90 Tests and suddenly here was this guy telling me in all seriousness to sit in the bath and sing about knocking the ‘kang’roos’ flat and not upsetting Ian Todd, the cricket correspondent of the Sun. David Gower, the skipper, looked as though he was having a near-death experience. The rest of us just sat there in stunned silence. I can’t imagine what the younger players thought. All I do know is that neither I nor any of the other players did much singing in the bath that night.

Just before Ted resigned at the end of the 1993 season, and after his comments about England’s poor showing having something to do with the juxtaposition of Venus in relation to the other planets, he complained that every time he opened his mouth he was ‘harpooned and lampooned’ by the press. It was probably one of the simplest tasks of their journalistic careers.

I am still at a loss to explain exactly what his role in the England set-up was. All I know is that he frequently caused huge embarrassment to himself and others. It is hard to take seriously a chairman of selectors who calls his premier fast bowler Malcolm Devon and then gets all excited about the prospect of picking a batsman called Jimmy Cook, who just happens to be South African.

I recall the time that John Morris and Jonathan Agnew realised they had no chance of going on the winter tour to the West Indies in 1989/90. They had arrived at the Porter Tun Room in the City of London for the Cricket Writers’ Club annual dinner on the eve of the NatWest Final to which several past and present cricketers are invited as guests of the members. This is the time when, traditionally, most of the talk is concerned with who will be in the squads for upcoming winter tours. When Morris and Agnew set off for the evening they must have thought they might have been in with a squeak. After their conversation with Ted they knew they had another think coming. ‘Excuse me, chaps’, Ted called out as he was walking down Chiswell Street in search of the venue. ‘You two look like cricketers. Do you know where this dinner is taking place?’

These stories may be amusing in hindsight, but as a professional I find that kind of amateurish behaviour hard to tolerate. Ted might have been a fine player and a lovely guy socially, but as far as I was concerned he was taking money under false pretences, money that could have been diverted to many other projects that would have served the game better.

But my opinion of him is not just based on the obvious gaffes he committed at regular intervals. For it was during that disastrous series of 1989 that I found not only was Dexter a man I could not respect, he was also a man I simply could not rely on at all.

Our performances throughout that series were undistinguished to say the least. Looking back, we had started off on the wrong foot even before a ball had been bowled. After the 1988 winter tour to India had been called off due to the Indian Board of Control’s objection to the inclusion of players who had been on the first ‘rebel tour’ to South Africa in 1982, England were looking for a new captain. The original choice of Dexter and the manager Micky Stewart had been Mike Gatting, but when that was vetoed by the chairman of the TCCB, Ossie Wheatley, who for some reason felt that Gatt had still not served sufficient time for his supposed misdemeanours, they turned reluctantly to David Gower. That meant that England were going into a vital series with a captain who the selectors had not wanted in the first place. This caused problems right from the start.

When Gower won the toss prior to the first Test at Headingley, Ted stuck his oar in straight away by persuading him that the inclement weather forecast (which incidentally turned out to be wildly inaccurate) meant England should ask Australia to bat first. And they did, all day and all the next day, scoring 601 for seven declared before going on to win the match by 210 runs. When I returned to the side after injury for the third Test at Edgbaston, we were already two-down and no one was really sure who was running things – Gower, Stewart or Dexter, least of all the captain himself!

At the same time, one of the worst-kept secrets in modern cricket history was starting to seriously undermine team spirit. The South African cricket authorities, led by Dr Ali Bacher, were in England recruiting players for another ‘rebel tour’ to be played that winter while the Test side were due to take on the West Indies in the Caribbean. The dressing room, and everywhere else it seemed, was awash with rumours of just how much money was on offer, who was going and who was not. It had reached the stage where the England committee asked players to sign a declaration of availability for the winter tour.

I had been targeted by the South Africans in a big way and was interested in what they had to say. Of course I was intrigued by the possibility; I would be lying if I said otherwise. So when Bacher rang me after the Edgbaston Test, I was definitely listening. The cash on the table for signing up for two winter tours was staggering. Even when I called their bluff by asking for half a million pounds, the organizers did not seem unduly perturbed. Everyone understood that those who did go could more or less kiss goodbye to the thought of playing Test cricket again for a long time and, in my case, probably for ever. Financially, however, it would have made a lot of sense. Although I was also under no illusions as to what would have happened to existing and future commercial contracts, I knew that most of my Test playing career was behind rather than ahead of me and that, had I accepted the South African money the financial benefit to myself and my family would have been enormous.

By this time, Micky Stewart, on behalf of the England management, was doing his best to persuade me not to go. They wanted me in the West Indies, he said, and he pleaded with me to make myself available. They made it quite clear that if I did so, I was more or less guaranteed a place on the plane.

It took a lot of soul-searching to come to a decision. I discussed the situation fully with Kath and my solicitor and long-time friend Alan Herd and once again, as I had done in 1982, I came to the conclusion that I had more to lose than gain.

The bottom line was pride: professional and patriotic. The West Indies were the one side against whom I felt I still had something to prove, both to myself and to the public. I had never fulfilled my potential against them as I should have done, and I wanted another crack. So I informed Micky of my availability and he accepted the news gratefully.

Then they proceeded to let me down badly. The night before the squad for the tour was due to be announced, Kath answered the phone. Ted was on the line.

‘Hello Ian,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid we’re not taking you to the West Indies.’

‘You what?’ I replied. ‘You begged me to make myself available for the winter tour and I told the South Africans where to go as well. And now you are saying you don’t want me after all.’

‘Er well, I didn’t ask you personally,’ he replied feebly.

I felt like I had been stabbed in the back. I went berserk and slammed the phone down on him. I don’t think I have ever felt so devastated. Seeing what a state I had worked myself into, Kath left the room; she knew I was not going to be fun to be around for a while. I was so enraged that if Ali Bacher had been sitting there with a contract and a pen I would have signed without a moment’s hesitation, and to hell with the consequences. I took myself off to the drinks cabinet and emptied a bottle of brandy in an effort to get it out of my system. Then, to really rub it in Micky and Ted later denied that they had persuaded me to make myself available. As far as I am concerned their denials were a lie.

To this day I’ve never been given a satisfactory explanation. From what I have been told it was Gooch, who replaced David Gower as captain when he was sacked at the end of the series and then also found himself out in the cold, who did not want me. Maybe I’ll never find out for certain. What I do know is that it was another phone call from Ted, on quite another subject, which finally removed any doubts that my England career was over.

A few days before the Trent Bridge Test against Australia in early July 1993, I answered the phone and, bearing in mind how he and the other selectors had studiously ignored my performances all summer, I was surprised to hear Ted on the other end of the line. That surprise quickly turned to amazement when I heard what he had to say. He asked me if I would be interested in taking the England A-team to Holland as captain.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Trying to avoid a conversation with him because I had heard enough and didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of even discussing this farcical suggestion any further, I replied that I had prior engagements and left it at that. But when I put the phone down I was seething. Ted had spent half the summer messing me about and now he had the cheek to ask me to get involved in a clog-dancing mission. All I could think of was that this was supposed to be some sort of peace offering for excluding me from the Test side, or a fancy public relations exercise. Either way, I was thoroughly cheesed off. It was just about the last straw.

The Test side was losing and showing no signs of improving. When they picked the side for the third Test from a position of 2–0 down with four to go, the party of thirteen contained five uncapped players. And then I received this call from Dexter asking me if I would like to waste my time in Holland. I knew now that my last chance had gone forever. If Ted really didn’t want me to be part of the new set-up, why didn’t he have the decency just to say so, instead of all this messing around? In the back of my mind I can’t help thinking that the real reason why Gooch, Dexter and company did not want either David Gower, Allan Lamb or myself back in the picture was that, if we had succeeded, they would have been left with an awful lot of egg on their faces. Against that sort of reasoning I knew my international career was over no matter how well I performed.

Once I discovered where I stood, I started to think about Durham. I wanted to be sure in my own mind that I was doing the right thing by them.

To be totally honest, there was no point in my playing any more championship cricket because we were near the bottom of the table and the county needed to rebuild. Although I had proved to myself that I could still perform with the bat by scoring a century against Worcestershire, my last match had ended with a two-day defeat by Surrey at The Oval. I had batted twice on the second day, faced eight balls, and made eight runs. We lost by an innings and more than 200 runs. I knew I was not going to be around for the following season and started to think about retirement in a positive way. At Durham there were four or five players whose contracts were on the line, and it was not fair that I should take up a place in the team while they were in limbo and likely to have only a handful of games in which to prove their worth.

At that point eight championship games remained, and I reasoned that by leaving there and then those fringe players would get a fair crack at earning contracts for the next season. It would also help the club because it would give them a chance to assess the talents of those players as they planned ahead. With those thoughts in my mind, there was obviously not a lot of point in my carrying on.

There was one significant advantage in getting out of the game at this stage. I’m sure that it is the hope of every father who plays professional sport that he will one day be able to watch his son performing at the same or higher level. I have not proved the exception to the rule, even though I have never pushed Liam to play cricket, rugby, or tiddlywinks for that matter, and have merely made sure that I was available if he needed me.

But no one in the family, least of all Liam himself, was under any illusions about the problems he might have to confront simply because of who he was. The fact that he has always been a naturally gifted sportsman and he is my son, means that he has been prey to the long-lens treatment. To a certain extent there is no harm in that, as long as the photographers and newspapers involved haven’t over-stepped the mark (and, by and large, they haven’t).

True to form, however, just around the time of my retirement, the thing we feared most happened. Liam, having been selected to play for England Under-15s against the touring South African boys in 1992, had showed enough talent and promise to be offered a summer spell with Hampshire. On his first day at ‘work’, a 2nd XI match against Worcestershire at Southampton, his club captain Mark Nicholas told me he had never seen so many reporters at the county ground. Liam took the whole thing in his stride, even being relaxed enough to tell the assembled throng that he intended to be even better than his Dad. Cheeky bugger! Liam, being a Botham, then managed to play a good game as well as talk one by taking four wickets.

So far, so good. Then, a couple of weeks later, the inevitable happened. A friend of mine from one of the national papers told me that people had been asking questions about an alleged incident involving Liam and some other Hampshire cricketers in a nightclub. Here we go again, I thought.

Liam had been playing for Hampshire seconds against Warwickshire in Leamington Spa. One evening after the close of play he went with some of the players to a local nightclub. Because he wasn’t born yesterday he made sure that he drank only soft drinks, but someone there recognized him and told the manager he was under age. The manager talked to Liam, told him what had happened and informed him, regretfully, that if there were any complaints he would have to ask him to leave. Half an hour later, the same guy complained again and Liam duly left with the minimum of fuss.

Apparently, this non-event was enough to get the Sunday Mirror terribly excited and a story duly appeared along the lines of Liam Botham, son of cricketing legend Ian, blah, blah, blah … being kicked out of a nightclub. What bothered me most was that this kind of thing is actually believed by people who should know better. These ignorant idiots, who for some reason have convinced themselves to believe everything they have read about me over the years, turn around and say ‘There, look at Liam Botham, like father like son’, and the mud sticks.

The problems of living and working under the scrutiny of the media were only one of the reasons why Liam made his decision to give up cricket in favour of his chosen professional sport, rugby union.

I never had any doubts that Liam was good enough to make a career for himself in cricket. His performance on first-class debut for Hampshire on 28 August 1996, two days short of his 19th birthday, proved the condition known as golden balls was indeed hereditary. Pulled out of a 2nd XI game he turned up for the county’s match against Middlesex at Portsmouth after the start of play, dismissed Gatt with his seventh delivery and finished with figures of 5 for 67. Had he been able to operate outside the glare of publicity over who he was and rather just be judged on how good he was, he might even have gone all the way.

But his decision was based as much on how he saw the two sports progressing as much as any feeling over living in the spotlight. Frankly, for a young man equally good at rugby and cricket, by the time he had to choose, there seemed little choice to make.

Of course, I would have loved to have played with or against Liam at county level. And I was delighted when he was brought in as a last-minute replacement for a charity match between the Rest of the World and my own England XI at Hove a few weeks before I announced my retirement. But realistically it was never going to happen in any other way. By announcing my retirement when I did, rather than dragging it out to the end of the season, I felt I could at least try and deflect some of the inevitable attention away from him as he attempted to take his first steps in the game.

I don’t regret many things in my life but the circumstances surrounding my final game have left me with a tinge of guilt. Although I was more than happy to be bowing out against the Aussies, it was such a spontaneous decision that I didn’t even get an opportunity to tell my parents about it. I didn’t exactly know what to tell them and, besides, the telephone did not seem the right way to go about it. As usual, it is the people nearest to you that you think about least. In all likelihood my father Les would have wanted to be there for my swansong; in some ways it was a relief that the game itself was a non-event.

I had decided to keep the news quiet until I had had the chance to talk to Geoff Cook, the director of cricket and David Graveney, the captain, about my plans. Dean Jones was the only one of my team-mates who knew in advance. I have always been very close to him and knew that, in the tradition of a true Aussie, if you tell him something in confidence you can be certain it isn’t going anywhere else. I told him on the Saturday morning when I picked him up on our way to the game. Dean said he wasn’t surprised. He told me that he and his wife, Jane, had been talking about me quitting only the week before, speculating on when it would happen. When I arrived at the Durham University ground, I saw David and Geoff, told them my decision and swore them to secrecy. At first David was dumbfounded, but when I explained that the body had had enough he accepted it. Mathematically, we still had a chance in the Sunday league competition and I told him that if he wanted me for the last few games, I would be happy to oblige. Once I told Geoff the reasons for my decision, he agreed that I had done the right thing and I appreciated that.

The information was so watertight that none of the other players knew about it until the following day, when the Mail on Sunday, who had managed to get wind of the story somehow, let the cat out of the bag. When I reached the ground for the second day’s play the place was buzzing. Geoff felt he had to confirm the story, but I was determined not to say anything publicly to anyone until I had fulfilled my newspaper column commitments by giving Chris Lander of the Daily Mirror the exclusive to which he and they were entitled. The rest would have to wait.

The third and final day’s play eventually started late in the afternoon because of rain, but there had been no sitting around for me. From the moment I arrived at the ground, it was like a circus. First there was a press conference that lasted 55 minutes, probably the longest of my career. Someone asked if I thought the rain would turn the day into something of an anti-climax, but I joked that as I had spent a lot of the last twenty years praying for a cloudburst, in some ways this would be a fitting end. I had hoped that my last day in first-class cricket would end more quietly than it did. I just wanted to drift back into the dressing room, pack up and go. The rain delay destroyed any prospect of a result, contrived or otherwise, but the skies cleared enough for us to play a pretty meaningless three or four hours in the afternoon. If ever there was a case where umpires or captains should be given a little bit of discretion in deciding to end the match, irrespective of the weather, this was it. The crowd was marvellous but nobody gained anything from us going out there except those who had spent so much time in the beer tent that they would have been captivated by watching Humpty Dumpty sitting on the wall. Steady, I wasn’t that overweight!

In my final spell of bowling I decided to have a bit of fun to try and cheer everyone up by doing my Jeff Thomson impersonations, among others. Then, after a few overs I turned to David Graveney and said: ‘Thanks David, I think that will do’. It was quite a moment. As I turned to take my position in the field, the reality of what I was doing suddenly hit me – no more bowling, no more batting, no more anything. The pavilion clock showed there was still half an hour to go but that was it from me, my time was over. It was the end.

Both batsmen, David Boon and Matthew Hayden, came down the wicket to shake my hand and I cannot remember anything that happened between that moment and the time stumps were drawn. I had, as they say, lost the plot. In fact, the only thing I do recall was my appalling attempt at keeping wicket for the final over of the match, minus pads and gloves. However, I was soon brought back down to earth when at the close of play I went into the dressing room to clear my locker. The bastards had pinched the lot!

On arriving home I threw myself into a small party we had arranged for close friends. I finally crashed at ten to five the following morning after talking Egyptian into the small hours with Alan Herd. It was only a short nap as I had to leave the house at 7.15 a.m. to catch a plane to Alderney where we have our second home. I have no idea how any of the others got home. It is quite possible, of course, that one or two might still be there now.

2 A BOUNCING BABY BOTHAM (#ulink_6148be70-324b-5894-a4f6-b17ca1c23579)

There was a time three months into my mother Marie’s pregnancy when the entire Ian Botham story might have been over before it had even begun.

Both my parents had been good at sport, highly competitive and fit as fiddles. Les, who was a keen cricketer, ran for East Yorkshire, had a soccer trial for Hull City boys and played for Combined Services, while Marie had played cricket, badminton and hockey to a reasonable standard. For some reason, however, they had acute difficulties in starting a family.

Marie had suffered four miscarriages before she became pregnant with me. Then, a third of the way through this pregnancy, she went through a particularly rough patch of health, and there were very real fears that she was going to miscarry again. Towards the end she was confined to bed, and it was obviously a worrying time for her and Les. What must have made it worse for her was that Les, serving in the Fleet Air Arm, was stationed in Northern Ireland so he was absent when the time came for Marie to enter the maternity hospital in Heswall, Cheshire. There must have been an overpowering sense of relief when, on a drizzly 24 November 1955, the first shout was heard from a bouncing 10lb loz baby Botham and a telegram was duly sent to inform Les he had become a father. In the excitement, when he finally arrived on leave a week later, he managed to oversee a complete muddle in the registering of my birth. My parents had been married in Scotland and for sentimental reasons had settled on the Scottish spelling of ‘Iain’. But the birth certificate read ‘Ian’ – so that was to be my name. It also (thankfully) read ‘Terence’ rather than the family’s traditional second name for boys, ‘Herbert’ (although some would say I have been a right one ever since). There is a familiar ring about a Botham father being out of town for the birth of a Botham child. I was in Australia on a Whitbread Scholarship in 1977 when Kathy discovered she was pregnant with Liam; I missed Sarah’s birth because I was on tour; and I was again missing for the arrival of Becky when I made my first walk for Leukaemia Research from John O’Groats to Land’s End.

Once on the planet, it seems I was determined to make my mark from the very start. Soon after I was born the family moved to Londonderry where we were put up in services’ married quarters, and it was here that I showed the first signs of the adventurous side of my nature. Mum recalls how she left me sitting with a box of toys inside a playpen in the living room while she was working in the kitchen. A few minutes later she was surprised to find me crawling around her feet. Puzzled, she carried me back to the playpen and convinced herself that, perhaps, after all, she had not put me inside in the first place. When I appeared in the kitchen for the third time she realized something was up and decided to keep an eye on me through the crack in the door. She couldn’t believe her eyes. I was lifting the edge of the playpen onto the toy box, crawling out under the gap and then pulling the playpen down to the floor again, leaving everything in the right place. Everything, that is, except me.

Once I had found a way out of my confinement, nothing was going to stop me as I found a variety of ways to get myself out and about and to cause parental palpitations. If I was left outside the house in my pram, brake or no brake, I would bounce it up and down until I eventually succeeded in getting the thing moving. I managed to cover some fairly impressive distances but, luckily, everyone knew who I was and where to return me. By the time my sister Dale was born in Ireland in February 1957 – I have one other sister, Wendy, and a brother Graeme – I was 15 months old, up on my own two feet and walking. Of course, that posed a new set of problems for Mum and Dad who were constantly running around trying to contain my wanderlust. Dad decided to fence in the garden but that was more of a challenge than an obstacle. For baby Botham, if it was there, it was there to be scaled. I regularly managed to escape and often the only evidence of me ever having been in the garden was a pair of dungarees left hanging on the fence.

At one time I even got as far as the driver’s seat of a big armed forces’ truck, where I was found playing happily with the steering wheel and fingering the hand brake. The cab was so high off the ground that nobody could work out exactly how I got there, and I shudder to think what mayhem might have been caused if I had prised the hand-brake loose.

If these were the first signs of the free spirit that was later to shape my life for good and sometimes for ill, my competitiveness took only slightly longer to manifest itself. After 18 months in Northern Ireland we returned to the mainland and Cheshire. During a toddlers’ 20-yard dash at the navy sports day, I hit upon a novel method of dealing with the opposition, which involved me barging into the rest of the field, leaving most of them on their back-sides, and consequently finding myself about as far ahead as you can get in a 20-yard race. Surprised, I stopped to look where the rest of the runners were, only to find them all back on their feet and streaming past me. Unfortunately, running was never one of my strong points; distances I could manage most of the time, but sprints and races were not my forté. Years later, a certain tactical naiveté led to my first sporting calamity at Buckler’s Mead School in Yeovil. As house captain for the school sports day, I had asked for volunteers for someone to compete in the mile race. Thank you, volunteers, for your vote. I was so determined to do well that if I had to run I was going to win or die trying. When they carried me off, I was about a lap ahead – it was just a pity that there were still another two to go.

Life as a toddler in Ireland had also been significant for the first of my many trips to hospital. A hard crack on the head led to my first stay in a hospital ward as I was kept in the Londonderry Hospital for four nights of observation. No serious damage was done that time, but it caused enough of a scare for the doctors to suggest that I should be fitted with some kind of protective headgear. Just telling me to mind how I went would have done no good at all, so Dad ended up making me a special foam helmet. Inevitably, it was only a matter of time before I was back in casualty. On settling in Yeovil, where Dad took up a position with Westland Helicopters after a year in the North West, Mum virtually had a waiting room chair reserved for herself in the local hospital.

I had my first operation in Yeovil General Hospital at the age of four. I had been out shopping with Mum in town when I suddenly collapsed with a terrible stomach pain. There was a panic, I was rushed to hospital and less than an hour later I was on the way to the operating theatre for surgery on a hernia. To make things easier for me, my parents brought in my teddy bear, Mr Khrushchev, the name inspired by the influence of television in my early upbringing. To make me feel better the hospital staff pretended the bear had been through the same ordeal as me and had undergone the same treatment. On my discharge I gave probably the first and last hint that I might possibly be interested in anything other than sport as a career. Mum told me to thank the doctors for looking after me and, according to her, I said: ‘The doctors don’t make you better. They just stand there at the end of the bed, say “Good morning” and ask the nurses how you are. It is the nurses who do all the work and make you better. I think I’ll be a doctor when I grow up’. By the time I had another hernia operation four years later, I understood more about how the system actually worked and abandoned that idea for good.

For the next six years, home was 64 Mudford Road, Yeovil, a house with plenty of trees and a large garden, although not large enough for my liking. What lay beyond the garden gate still proved an irresistible draw and led to one of my first encounters with the iron fist inside the velvet glove of Marie Botham. It was only the shock of being told that Dale and I were found running across the busy main road that led Mum to administer the spanking, for that had certainly not been the normal reaction to our misdemeanours. When Dad came home at lunchtime to find us in bed, he thought we were ill. Punishments usually took the form of the ‘you have nearly pushed it too far’ warning movement of Mum’s hand towards the wooden spoon she kept in the kitchen as a deterrent. But as I grew older the occasional smack was administered, superseded at my secondary modern school by the cane, a regular adversary, and they certainly did me no harm. Pity there is not more of it these days.

It was about this time that my sporting life began in earnest. The house at Mudford Road backed on to the playing fields of Yeovil Grammar School, where I could often be found watching the older boys playing cricket. I was frequently discovered here by Len Bond, an assistant groundsman at the school, who would cart me back home in his wheelbarrow. My love affair with sport began in earnest when I moved from Miss Wright’s private school at Penmount to Milford Junior School in September 1962. The school day worked on the basis that I went home for lunch, until I discovered that if you stayed for a school dinner you could also play football. I managed to persuade Mum and Dad to let me stay on even though I was in my first year and you were not meant to play football until the second. My ally was Richard Hibbitt, the deputy headmaster who was in charge of games. He saw how keen I was, made room for me and was soon asking my parents for permission to pick me for the school team. That was all the encouragement I needed, and by the ripe old age of seven I was already practising my autograph for the day when I would be famous.

I didn’t have to wait long for my first appearance on national television, although Songs Of Praise from St John’s in Yeovil was not exactly what I had in mind. At the time the family attended church fairly regularly, and as the church choir was struggling for numbers I was drafted in. I should point out that my singing talents, which are legendary, had no bearing on my selection. I was so bad that when the big day came I was told politely but firmly to mime. Ironically, when the programme went out, I was the chorister who received the most attention from the cameras. Indeed, my ability as a mime artist was to stand me in good stead in pantomime later on in life.

Considering the number of times I have been called upon to scribble my name since then, all that handwriting practice at the age of seven was of great use. Not that you would ever have convinced my parents or teachers at the time: for them it was another distraction from the real job of inwardly digesting. My form mistress at Milford, Mrs Olwyn Joyce, was heard despairingly telling my parents that she wished the school had been built in a traditional style rather than with modern, panoramic windows. Being easily distracted by the sight and sound of a bouncing ball, I was forever staring out of the window watching other classes playing games and wishing I was out there with them.

There were no such problems with Mr Hibbitt. He even forgave me for breaking a school window since the damage had been caused by a cricket ball. Although I had been bowling daisy cutters at the garage door from the age of six and disappearing into the local park for games of cricket at every available opportunity, Mr Hibbitt showed me that there was money to be made from sport when he placed a pile of coins on a good length on the pitch and told us that if we managed to hit them, the cash was ours. I cleaned up, as I did later when, at thirteen, I made my debut for Somerset Under-15s against Wiltshire. The deal was 6d per run, and my score of 80 ensured a jackpot which my Dad was forced to cough up but did not risk again. Needless to say, my one great sporting achievement at Milford came in the form of a six which Mr Hibbitt reckoned would have carried at either Taunton or Lord’s. Then, one sports day I took part in a contest to see who could throw the cricket ball furthest on the playing fields of Buckler’s Mead.

I was standing at the throwing line when the teacher doing the measuring in the distance shouted at me to have my go. It had to be pointed out to him that not only had I already done so, but my ball had landed many yards behind the spot where he was standing. Later, incidentally, in the summer of 1968 the same thing happened when I managed a record throw of just over 207 feet in the Under-13 tournament of the Crusaders’ Union National Sports Day at Motspur Park in South London. The judges did not believe the distance I had achieved with my first throw and made me throw again. They measured this one and I came home with the Victor Ludorum Cup for my age group and a record that stood for many years.

By the time I moved to secondary school at Buckler’s Mead, my sheer bloody-mindedness about getting my own way was well established. In general, I enjoyed myself. My lack of aptitude for an academic life was well-known by my mates who christened me ‘Bungalow’. I got into a few scrapes and scraps, but when the punishment was handed out I took it without complaining. The most serious incident came when I walked out of a woodwork lesson and never went back. Woodwork and I never really got on. I would start to make a coffee table and the legs would get shorter and shorter until all that was left was a big tray. My dovetails never dovetailed and I had no interest at all in the subject. The end came when I was in the workroom one day and the teacher, a Mr Black, suddenly turned round because someone had been mucking about behind me. There were no questions asked, he just walked up to me and whacked me on the head with a T-square. I was so angry, I was shaking. I wanted to flatten him there and then. Instead I told him I was going to do him a favour and leave the room. I went straight to the headmaster, explained what had happened and told him I was not the sort of person who would go home bleating about what had gone on in school. I said that I was never going in a class with Mr Black again, and I got my way.

Adolescence brought the usual horrors for me and my family. My ideas about fashion were to cause one or two run-ins. I was a teenager at the time when platform shoes were all the rage – the first time around. Quite naturally I wanted some, whatever Mum said, but shortly after I eventually got hold of a pair, I realized that she might just have been right all along. Mum was always keen to be with me when I bought clothes because she was rightly fearful of the consequences of my colour blindness. This time I spurned her offer and went into town on my own with the inevitable dire results: blue flared trousers, a bright orange shirt with a huge collar, and a pair of immense platform shoes. Mum and Dad were going out that evening to watch some five-a-side football at a local sports centre and I told them I would join them later in my new gear. In the process of putting on this ghastly costume, I managed to trip over my shoes and rip the trousers.

Mum also noticed around this time that I had begun to open my eyes to the possibility that girls might offer more than pig-tails to pull. When I came home one day and announced casually that I required some Lifebuoy soap, Mum’s response was immediate.

‘What’s her name?’ she inquired.

‘Margaret,’ I told her.

‘And what is the attraction?’

‘She can run faster than me.’

We all have at least one tale from this grisly adolescent period which we pray will be forgotten about on Judgement Day. Mine involved my sister Dale and her pet hamster. My return home for the weekend from the Lord’s groundstaff, where I had been taken on as a ‘trainee cricketer’ following a recommendation by Somerset, coincided with its untimely demise. On hearing the news, I went up to Dale’s room, removed the hamster from its cage and, paying scant attention to her grief, proceeded to swing it around by its tail to make sure it really was dead. Dale somehow failed to see the funny side.

I was a real charmer to Dale and my other sister Wendy, putting live spiders in their beds etc., and once I very nearly caused our charwoman, Mrs Whittle, to have a heart attack. I decided it would be great fun to deposit a large plastic snake behind a chair she was about to clean. You could hear the shrieking all down the street.

Every youngster threatens to leave home at one time or another. My big moment came when I announced to Mum I was off to London to see the bright lights. Within ten minutes, there waiting for me in the hall were my bags, packed and ready. When it dawned on me that if Mum did not clean my cricket gear I would have to, I thought better of it. But the real battles at home were over my absolute determination to make a career out of sport. My parents were worried about what would happen if I failed to make the grade or was badly injured, not that the thought ever existed in my mind. When, after I had succeeded in escaping from school at fifteen, Somerset arranged for me to go to Lord’s, Roy Kerslake, a prominent member of the county’s cricket committee, had to do the hard sell on my Dad who was worried that if it should all fall apart I would be a 16-year-old with no qualifications. What swung the decision for him was being told that those who failed to make it to the county circuit would often use their groundstaff experience to find jobs coaching cricket at independent schools.

As far as I was concerned, however, the only choice I had to make was which sport to concentrate on. I already had an offer to join Crystal Palace football club. The manager at the time, a West Country man named Bert Head, wanted to sign me and I asked Dad for some advice as there were other clubs, five from the First Division as I recall, who were after me as well. Les said ‘Right, son. I think you are a better cricketer’, and that was the decision made. Had the offer come from Stamford Bridge, things might have turned out very differently because I was a Chelsea fanatic. When my turn to choose the bedroom decor coincided with their FA Cup winning run of 1970, I gave Mum a Chelsea rosette so that she could buy the wallpaper and bed covers in exactly the right colours. She drew the line when it came to the carpet, but even so the name Chelsea was stencilled all over the house, and when they beat Leeds United in the Cup Final replay at Old Trafford, I went up to my room with a piece of chalk and sketched the trophy on the wall as the finishing touch.

If you were to ask a psychoanalyst to explain the awesome significance of all these early experiences (and I can assure you I have no intention of doing so) I suppose that he would conclude that here were the makings of a character that was determined not to be shackled and to have his own way. Certainly, my hatred of confined spaces is well known. In later years, it was very easy for my critics and others to point to my dislike of net practice as yet another sign of a supposed lack of professionalism. ‘What, Beefy in the nets? He must be ill’, they would jibe.

The fact is that I have always suffered badly from claustrophobia and although some will still take this with a cellar full of salt, nets felt like prisons to me. I genuinely used to suffer acute anxiety from being in them, and I suppose that is why on many occasions my batting practice would degenerate into a slog. As so often with me, it was a case of covering up a genuine fear with sheer bravado. It goes without saying that I am a show-off – I don’t hide from that and I’m not trying to excuse it. If I hadn’t been, I’m sure I would not have been able to produce some of the great performances I did. But I’m sure it is no coincidence that I felt most fired up when my back was against the wall. That was not simply a Roy of the Rovers mentality: the fact is that when you have nowhere to go, the only way out is to emerge with all guns blazing. Imran Khan, the great Pakistan all-rounder and captain, talked about this when he described how his team had come from the depths of despair to win the 1992 World Cup. After they had been humbled in the initial qualifying matches he told his players ‘Be as a cornered tiger … Come out and fight’, and sometimes that is the only option available.

All through my life I have possessed extraordinary self-belief. Even as a kid, there were no doubts about what I was going to do when I grew up. I was going to be a professional sportsman. When I encountered the careers master at Buckler’s Mead this attitude of mine would often lead to a series of pointless rows as I would be summoned to the library to go through the same ritual time and again.

‘Morning, Ian. What thoughts have you had since we last met?’

‘Nothing new. I still want to play sport.’

‘Fine. Everyone wants to play sport. But what are you really going to do?’

I would end up repeating myself, getting angry and saying that there was no point in my attending these advisory sessions because I knew precisely what I was going to do. There were dozens behind me in the queue who had no idea what they wanted to do, and they were the ones who needed a careers master, not me.

Clearly these aspects of my character have been absolutely vital in enabling me to enjoy my career and live life to the full. All sportsmen who make it to the top have to be ultra-competitive, there simply is no other way to succeed. Without the desire to win and the need to be better than the rest, you won’t last five minutes. However, as the Americans are prone to saying, ‘If you want to talk the talk, you have to walk the walk’. As a kid I simply had to win at everything, and that desire to be No.1 has never left me. I make no apologies for the way I have conducted myself over the years and I have no regrets. Life is too short to be forever wondering whether you did the right thing. But I fully appreciate that there has been a price to pay and that, more often than not, others have had to pay it.

I have always found it difficult to admit to mistakes. I had enough trouble conceding that I might possibly have made an error on the cricket field. My cricketing team-mates will tell you that, according to me, I was never, ever, out. If a bowler was lucky enough to take my wicket, I had a never-ending supply of excuses to run through when I got back to the dressing room. As far as I can recall, I don’t think I ever came up with something totally ludicrous; there was always a hint of plausibility in the argument I put forward. No, I didn’t claim to be distracted by UFOs and there was nothing like ‘I crashed the car, sir, because the tree that wasn’t in my driveway yesterday was there now’. But I have to admit to serving up some real beauties in my time; like being put off by someone turning the page of his newspaper, for instance. Similarly, when I was bowling, if a batsman hit me for four it was not because he had played a good shot or I had bowled a bad ball. Invariably it was all part of a grand plan and it was simply a matter of time before the poor sucker fell for it. If I dropped a catch it was obviously because the ball was coming out of the sun. If there was no sun in the sky at the time, then a passing cloud would get the blame. If no cloud, then the moon. I would come up with anything rather than admit that I had been at fault. It was a case of protecting my pride, making myself feel invulnerable. Perhaps the most comical of all of these incidents took place during the Old Trafford Test of the 1989 summer series against Australia when, with our first innings total on 140 for four, a moment when the state of the match dictated that a modicum of discretion was required, I aimed a wild swing at the spinner Trevor Hohns in an attempt to hit him out of the ground and missed. That must be classed as one of my most embarrassing moments on the cricket field, alongside the time I went out to bat against Western Australia in Perth on the 1986/87 tour with a throbbing hangover and no bat.

‘Sorry about that, lads,’ I said, as I slid back into the dressing-room. ‘My bleedin’ bat got stuck behind my pads.’

‘I didn’t notice they were strapped to your bleedin’ head,’ replied John Emburey.

The bottom line was immaturity. For me, the slightest admission of failure or inadequacy was out of the question, and it was the same whatever I did. When, at the age of fifteen I returned home from a school cruise on the Mediterranean having shot up in height on the trip to over six foot, my behaviour was quite extraordinary. Dale and I used to measure ourselves against the kitchen door and it annoyed me intensely that she had always been taller. This time I insisted that Mum measure me and when I discovered how much I had grown, I ran into the garden to find my sister, shouting ‘Dale! Come here now. I want to measure you!’ You wouldn’t have believed my reaction upon discovering that I had finally outgrown her. FA Cup winners have celebrated less. It was pathetic.

If I drove a sports car I had to drive it faster than anyone else, as the men from Saab found out when I managed to write off two in the space of an afternoon’s sponsored racing at a cost of £24,000. When I decided to try and raise money for leukaemia research the only way to do it was to walk the length and breadth of the country (or over the Alps with some unenthusiastic elephants), and if I was drinking with mates, I had to drink them under the table as a matter of principle. I would do anything or try anything to show how big I was, and that included drugs.

I won’t go into details now because you will read more later, but, yes, of course I have overdone the booze in my time and smoked the odd joint. I may have been depressed, I may have been tempted to do it for kicks – and believe me, on the international cricket circuit during the years I played, there were a multitude of kicks to be had – but the fact is that I did so for no other reason than because they were there. I broke the law. I’m not proud of it and there were occasions when I could have gone seriously off the rails.

But when people ask me what I dislike most about myself, the answers are very simple and straightforward. It has taken me long enough to confront the facts, but I am not afraid to do so now. When it comes to getting myself into hot water, a lot of what you will have heard and read about me is absolute rubbish, but some of it is not. I have been a selfish bastard. At times I have also been aggressive, tyrannical, chauvinistic and hot-tempered.

My only plea in mitigation is that if I hadn’t been, none of what you are about to read would ever have taken place.