LITMIR.BIZ

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South African Test star Barry Richards, rated as one of the all-time greats. Our wicket-keeper Derek Taylor used to stand up to the stumps for my bowling in those days (bloody cheek!) and, after I had bowled him, Richards actually stood his ground for a few moments because he was convinced that the ball with which I had beaten him all ends up must have cannoned off Derek’s pads onto the stumps (even more bloody cheek!). As a young tyro I was reasonably satisfied with the rest of my performance in the field that day, which brought one more wicket and the chance of some purposeful hurtling around the boundary. In fact, although I didn’t know it at the time, my whole life was about to change.

      When I came to the wicket, Somerset were more or less dead and buried. Seventy runs were required from the final 15 overs as I marched out to bat at number 9, with only three wickets remaining. Tom Cartwright, my batting partner and the man to whom I owe more than anyone for helping me become a top-class bowler, soon departed from the action, caught at mid-on. And then, shortly after I had been joined by Hallam Moseley, it happened.

      Andy Roberts had been terrorizing English county pros all season playing for Hampshire and was about to establish himself as the West Indies’ main strike bowler for a decade. With 38 runs needed, hooking him for six seemed like a good idea at the time. But I paid for my foolishness when, next ball, Roberts bowled me the fastest delivery I had ever seen, or, to be more accurate, not seen. I knew roughly from which direction it was coming and my first instinct was to try and hook it. Halfway through getting into position to play the shot the truth hit me – and then, a fraction of a second later so did the ball. These were pre-helmet days, of course, but I did just manage to raise a gloved hand in front of my face, and that instinctive act of self-preservation almost certainly saved me from serious injury. In the event, the force of the ball smacking into my glove which then, in turn, smacked into my face, was still sufficient to knock out one tooth and break another clean in half. Looking back, the worrying thing was that the teeth in question were on opposite sides of the jaw.

      By the time I had spat them out, taken a glass of water and had a spot of treatment, I was fully aware that there were some in the crowd who, believing that the game was up, actually wanted me to go off retired hurt to avoid further, unnecessary punishment.

      The thought never crossed my mind. In fact, there was very little crossing my mind at that particular moment. The effects of mild concussion meant that it was not until some time afterwards that I had any kind of clear recollection of what followed, but in a curious way I think the incident helped to settle me down. I predicted that Roberts’ next delivery would be a yorker, guessed right and managed to get enough bat on ball to clip it away for three runs. From then on, I succeeded in farming as much of the strike as possible so that, after Hallam departed, there were just seven runs needed to win from sixteen balls when number 11 Bob Clapp joined me.

      Although those watching must have found the tension unbearable, my total concentration meant that I was in a cocoon. In the penultimate over I played and missed three times before connecting with the winning hit to the cover boundary. As a batsman, Bob was what is commonly known in the game as a ferret – he went in after the rabbits. But I will always be grateful to him for helping me make my name. He finished with one of the best nought not outs in history, I collected the Gold Award and the first chapter of the fairy tale was written.

      That evening a couple of old Somerset players, Bill Alley and Kenny Palmer, who later went on to become Test umpires, warned me: ‘Today, you are everybody’s hero. Tomorrow, they’ll have forgotten you’. Needless to say I thanked them for the advice, but what I really felt was more along the lines of ‘Give it a rest, you old buggers’. In fact the lesson they were trying to pass on could not have been more apt and, as time passed, that peculiarly English phenomenon they were warning me about – newspaper today, fish-and-chip paper tomorrow – became a recurrent theme. For the moment all I could see were the headlines.

      The first produced unexpected results. When I strode into the Gardener’s Arms for a celebratory pint of bitter and a spot of mild adulation, I informed the landlord, ‘The usual, please’.

      I was somewhat taken aback by his response when he turned and asked: ‘And just what is your usual?’

      ‘The usual,’ I replied, a shade irritated. ‘You know what it is, the same as it’s been for the last year and a half.’

      At this point, the local evening paper was produced and waved under my nose. The headline read: ‘17-YEAR-OLD SOMERSET YOUTH PLAYS A BLINDER’. Fortunately the landlord was chuckling as he poured out the pint, knowing full well that had he applied the letter of the licensing laws in my case, his profits would have been cut in half over the past 18 months.

      When the next day brought my first experience of national newspaper coverage, you could not see my head for the clouds. ‘BLOOD, SWEAT AND CHEERS FOR BOTHAM’, announced the Guardian. ‘YOUNG BOTHAM THE SOMERSET HERO’ echoed the Daily Telegraph. Who was I to argue?

      There is no doubt that the whole affair had an enormous effect on my career. Because of the press reaction, people all over the country had been made aware of the existence of somebody who up until that point had been, to almost all of them, a nobody. And it had all happened overnight.

      We all want heroes to worship, whether they be sportsmen or women, film stars, actors, politicians, rock stars, brain surgeons or journalists. It may or may not surprise you to learn that John Wayne was mine. Now, because of my exploits on the field, I had set a certain standard for myself that many observers expected me to live up to every time I went out to bat or bowl. (I felt this particularly after the events of the summer of 1981 when the Australians were the victims of the best Test cricket of my life.) This meant that from then on, producing a great performance for Somerset carried extra significance. In terms of national awareness I was still a small fish in a big pool and, certainly in the opinion of good judges, I had nowhere near as much potential as another young Somerset batsman called Vivian Richards. But from that moment on, the name Botham rang a bell.

      There is no doubt, either, that at this stage there was a very real danger of allowing the publicity to go to my head. Although my time on the Lord’s groundstaff had taught me many lessons in life, I was still young, raw and very naive. In fact, even to get as far as I had done, I was extremely fortunate to have been in the presence of two men who, despite all my efforts to exasperate them, were prepared to keep an eye on me and encourage me.

      Brian Close, the man chiefly responsible for turning Somerset from a social side into a successful one, was a hard nut – some would say a nutter. A tough Yorkshire-man who was never prepared to compromise, his whole approach to the game was based on absolute belief in his own ability and that there was no point in turning up if you weren’t prepared to do everything to win. It was this self-belief that enabled him to play for England and attain the ‘double’ of 100 wickets and 1000 runs in county cricket at the age of eighteen. However, his abrasiveness meant he was never likely to be a darling of the establishment. It was no surprise to anyone, least of all him, when he was sacked from the England captaincy after the Yorkshire side he was skippering were booed off the field following his decision to use time-wasting tactics to ensure a draw against Warwickshire in 1967.

      To others more mindful of personal safety, the call to return to Test cricket at the age of 45, after nine years in the international wilderness, might have been answered with two fingers. But when the England captain Tony Greig decided he needed the physical equivalent of a brick wall to stand up to the West Indies pace attack that had been battering his team black and blue during the summer of 1976, it was typical of Closey that he accepted without a moment’s hesitation. No one who witnessed it will ever forget his bravery when standing up to the horrendous onslaught from Roberts and Company in the Manchester gloom. Even Clive Lloyd, the West Indies captain, admitted his bowlers had gone over the top that day. But typical of Closey, he was just as proud of his bruises as he was of his batting. One of the standing jokes in the Somerset dressing room was his insistence that although Muhammad Ali might just beat him over fifteen rounds, he would be damned if the champ would knock him out. This was not just the usual dressing room bravado either, he really meant it. It goes without saying that I loved the guy for his guts. In fact, I would go so far as to say that starting out with Closey was vital for me because he taught me so much about

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