Innings that explain the Ashes, No.1: Botham's last great howl of protest

The weekend of June 11-12, 1974, is much like any other in the overcrowded sick room of mid-Seventies Britain. A just-gone spring election, called amid the chaos of the three-day week, has seamlessly shifted power from the embittered, paranoic Tory, Ted Heath, to the embittered, paranoic Labourite, Harold Wilson. Inflation is at 19 per cent. Sir Alf has just been sacked as England boss. Restrictions on electricity usage have failed to halt Gary Glitter’s seedy march up the charts, the final Bagpuss episode has just aired, and the England cricket team are making heavy work of beating the Indians at Old Trafford.

The Manchester match is a joyless affair on a sawdust-caked square that will fall to England on the Saturday evening, a final-session win to set them up for a 3-0 clean sweep. That night, however, June 11, 1974, the team’s opening bat does not feel like celebrating.

Geoffrey Boycott is besieged. He’s just spat out scores of 10 and 6 in the most miserable match of his life. The team’s captain, Mike Denness, a peculiarly cheerful Scotsman, has made it clear, at least as far as Geoff understands it, that he wants nothing to do with him. A few days later, still raging, Boycott will tell them to stuff it. His exile will last three years and span 30 Tests, including six in Australia that winter, when the nativist quicks Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson tear through England’s puny resistance with such carnal indifference that the timing of Geoff’s sabbatical becomes a point of strained national debate.

Meanwhile, on Sunday June 12, 1974, the day after England’s win at Manchester, Somerset host Hampshire in the quarter-final of the B&H Cup. That evening, Somerset are chasing victory when a thick-set teenager batting at No.9 is too late on a hook shot from the champion fast bowler Andy Roberts. He will flob out the blood, round up his smashed incisors, gargle a little from the glass of water sent out by his nonplussed skipper Brian Close, and reassess the gaps in the field. He will finish the match 45 not out, winning the game with a boundary from the final ball of the penultimate over.

That night, Close holds court in the Taunton pavilion bar. To anyone within earshot, he offers words to this effect: “I don’t want everybody telling him he’s a world-beater after one game. He’s got enough confidence as it is. He needs to learn the bloody game first.”

Three years and 46 days later, the fates of these two archetypes, these cigarette cards made flesh, would converge again.

On July 28, 1977, England would play Australia at Trent Bridge in the third Test of that summer’s Ashes. For Boycott, 36, the match is a last chance to revive a once great career. For Ian Botham, 21, it’s opening night.

***

1977

Third Test, Trent Bridge – England win by seven wickets
Fourth Test, Headingley – England win by an innings and 85 runs

ENGLAND WIN THE SERIES 3-0

The boy goes first. An hour into the second session Botham is midway through his third spell of extravagant away-duckers when he sends down a half-tracker to the Australian captain Greg Chappell, who promptly drags it onto his own stumps.

It is perhaps the ugliest shot that Greg Chappell has ever played or ever will play. But then this is not the Greg Chappell of lore, the Greg Chappell of Ashes hundreds on debut and two more on his maiden tour. This is the brooding, righteous Greg Chappell: the version with far too much on his mind to simply punch some rookie’s long hop through the covers. And why might this be? Well, because the 1977 Ashes is an unhinged series. An unhinged series for unhinged men.

Australian cricket is in crisis, ripped apart by a bitter, year-long war between the Australian Cricket Board and the media mogul Kerry Packer’s Nine Network, over issues of TV rights and player pay. The lure of real money is winning out. By the time the Test squad touches down in London, Packer’s rebel breakaway league, World Series Cricket, has hoovered up 13 of their 17-man squad, including Chappell himself. Only some last-minute compromise deals have enabled the selectors to cobble together any kind of team at all.

(England, by the way, are not immune to the Packer inferno; the all-rounder Tony Greig has already been stripped of the England captaincy for signing up with WSC, to be replaced in 1977 by English cricket’s floating-brain-in-a-jar, Mike Brearley. But the Ashes is still the Ashes – so Greig has been recalled to the ranks. As we will discover, principles tend to be applied a little more elastically in an Ashes year.)

So, brooding, righteous Greg Chappell has a cob on. And thus, when Greg Chappell opens his unusually tense shoulders to play one of his signature shots, his thoughts, once so clear and methodical, surround the future of his young family, and his Adelaide business portfolio, and the meaning of baggy green felt caps, and how everyone and everything has a price.

But to put this one on Greg Chappell is to ignore the swag of the rebel child who wanged it down there in the first place. If he had known what that bowler was about to become – and get this: how irritated his own family would come to be with him – then he’d have got right in behind the line of that floaty nothing ball and blocked the thing to death.

Except that isn’t what happens. In that single delivery, Ian Botham will reveal a rare genius for locating, mining and amplifying states of disorder in his opponents. Call it a gift for smashing things up. From that moment, and for some years after, Australia’s finest cricketers will play the man before the ball.

And Boycs? Oh, it’s vintage stuff. He’s into his work early on day two, calling the local hero Derek Randall through for an impossible single to leave him yards short. For some minutes after, Geoff stands motionless mid-pitch, arms folded, bat cradled to his chest, head bowed. The crowd are not especially happy. Boycott repays them as only he can, by batting through 90 overs for 87 undefeated runs. On the third day he goes to his 12th Test hundred. On the fifth, he chalks up an unbeaten 80 to see England home by seven wickets. He’s back, as beguilingly Boycottian as ever.

His Nottingham epic is first-class hundred No.98. By the time of the fourth Test at Leeds, for the grand homecoming, he is one away. England bat first, so Boycs bats all day. At the close he stands on the balcony holding a glass of champagne to his people.

At Trent Bridge, on his first day of Test cricket, Botham picks up a five-bag. In the Geoff-stream at Leeds, he takes five more. England will win both matches, the second to regain the Ashes. When the series is concluded after The Oval, the Post Office report that their Test scores service has received 22,556,000 calls.

The summer has thrown these two deeply different men together, entwined in a strange bond that will hold tight for the next half a decade. (Notwithstanding that episode with the shaving cream. And that time when Botham deliberately ran him out for batting too slowly in New Zealand. “What have you done?” an incredulous Boycs is reputed to have asked him. “I’ve run you out, you c***,” Botham replies.) Their relationship is perhaps best summarised by the old seamer, thinker, and early Botham mentor Tom Cartwright, who once observed that if Botham saw ability, “in whatever direction”, he would show respect for it.

Early-days Botham moves through the field like the 28-tonne, armour-plated bus favoured by his idol, Mrs Thatcher. Nothing and no one can derail him. After 11 Tests he’s accrued eight five-wicket hauls and three anarchic hundreds. His first Ashes tour – against an embarrassed Australia team decimated by WSC defections, Chappell included – is a triumph, with England, astutely led by Brearley, winning it 5-1 and Botham picking up 23 wickets.

He careens to ‘the double’ of 1,000 runs and 100 wickets in just his 21st Test, faster than any man in history, and after 24 matches, will have racked up a set of numbers so preposterous that the greybeards controlling English cricket alight on the cunning plan to lump him with the captaincy.

No matter that he’s already the central force in the team, with a hot head, a hatred of authority and a taste for throwing his teammates in swimming pools with their clothes on. Let’s just do it anyway. It’s only 10 Tests in a row against the West Indies.

It’s 1980 when the call comes. He is 24. And guess what? It doesn’t work.

***

1982/83

Second Test, Brisbane – Australia win by seven wickets
Fourth Test, Melbourne – England win by three runs

AUSTRALIA WIN THE SERIES 2-1

At this point we’re going to take a leap. We’re going to assume that if you’ve got this far,
you know what comes next. You’ll know that Botham goes winless across two series against perhaps the best team of all time, losing his cool in his debut game in charge at Port of Spain, skying a Viv Richards off-break to deep mid-off when a draw is the only play. That he turns insular and paranoid and spends the rest of that Caribbean tour knee-deep in a forever war with his enemies, real and imagined, of the fourth estate. You will know that two things can be true at once. That British tabloid newspapers have embarked on a decade-defining race to the gutter, dragging anyone with a pulse down with them; and two, that Ian Botham should not have been England captain in the first place.

You’ll be across the bit about him hanging on to his job into the 1981 Ashes, but madly only on a match- by-match basis, and you’ll have winced at the clip of him walking back up the steps of the Lord’s pavilion, glowering at the members on the benches hid behind their Telegraphs, having just bagged the pair that seals his fate. And of course you will know that things pick up
a little after that.

The sixth and final Test of that summer is a dead rubber at The Oval. Years later, I will ask Botham about that match. He will have no recollection of it at all, not even the vaguest memory that he took 10 wickets in it. The job had already been done; the name already branded on the legend. Still, even the most forgettable Tests throw up a story somewhere. In England’s first innings, Geoffrey Boycott will hit seven fours in a stay of 441 minutes – less than one boundary per hour – and in the second innings, just to keep them gagging for more, he will bag a duck.

It is Boycott’s last act in the Ashes, and his final ever Test in England. That winter, he will accept an offer to play for an England XI in apartheid South Africa, knowing that the decision will bring the curtain down on his 108-match Test career.

And Beefy? He’ll turn it down of course, writing that he could never have looked his mate Viv in the eye. Spotless principles? Not everyone was entirely sure. Matthew Engel, the sometime Wisden editor who covered the matches, would later observe that while the high moral tone was “not necessarily” insincere, it was also true that, financially, the biggest stars “had too much to lose”.

One thing is beyond doubt going into 1982: Botham is the biggest star in Britain. And from such a place, there is only one way to go.

The Ashes of 1982/83 is a harbinger. Australian cricket has begun the process of sorting itself out. Greg Chappell is back as skipper, and now only averagely brooding and righteous; Packer’s putsch has worked. The post-WSC landscape is less penurious, and its playing force more unified, but public favour has been harder to win back. Chappell desperately needs results – since winning in England in 1975, Australia have recorded just two victories in a full Ashes series. After a hot and painfully slow draw at Perth, the hosts take the second Test at the Gabba to go one-up.

Botham is neither in prime form nor shape. After two Tests he has five wickets at 62 apiece, and 67 runs. His away-swinger has deserted him and his rhythm is off. He has begun to experience the strangest of sensations: the ebbing away of confidence. He is not releasing the ball with any certainty. His pace is down, and his mood black.

Not untypically, he would put much of it down to outside factors beyond his control. “The bloodhounds were let loose on that tour,” he would later write. “Those newspaper editors who believed their job entailed knocking people down as quickly as they built them up in order to maintain interest and, more crucially, circulation, had decided that Ian Botham was next. I certainly got the feeling they were waiting for me.”

Sometime during the Gabba Test, a plan is hatched by some wags watching in the bleachers. When the teams return on the tour to play an ODI, a piglet is somehow smuggled into the ground and released onto the outfield. On one half of its ample flank is written the letters EDDIE, in honour of England’s portly off-spinner, Hemmings. And on the other? You’ve got it.

Across the series, Botham will take 18 wickets at 40 and strike a single fifty. Only the game at Melbourne offers him any respite, when Jeff Thomson nicks a Botham half-volley to Chris Tavaré at slip, who palms it to Geoff Miller to clinch one of the tightest victories in Test history. It isn’t enough. England give up the Ashes with a shrug. Botham’s bad back is impeding his mobility. The aura is starting to fray. The salad days are turning a little puff pastry.

***

1985

Fifth Test, Edgbaston – England win by an innings and 118 runs

ENGLAND WIN THE SERIES 3-1

It is far from linear, Australia’s ascension to becoming the best team in the world, but from this point on, each year marks a significant hinge point.

The Ashes of 1985 signifies the end of Australian geniality. It’s the mid-Eighties, and Chappell’s spiritual successor, Allan Border, has taken charge of a loveable, clubbable bunch of good guys. Border is the one world-class player in the team. Lillee has retired. Rod Marsh and Chappell too. Only the once-great fast bowler Jeff Thomson, now a peroxide parody, is hanging in there. They’re not a very good side. England are a little better.

Botham in 1985 is a one-man industrial complex of Eighties excess. His mullet evokes the look and artistic sensibilities of Spinal Tap. He has a new agent, a flashy Anglo-American in a stripey suit called Tim Hudson who believes his guy is the greatest hero since Wellington, swears he once witnessed a woman have an orgasm just by looking at him, and wants him to be the next James Bond.

He is big now, Eighties big, with big Eighties friends and big Eighties shoulders. He sees no irony in raging against the circulation wars of the British tabloid press while receiving large amounts of money from The Sun for his own ghosted column. Later that year he will walk the
length of the British Isles to raise money for leukaemia research. Cricket can barely hold him together. Yet for one last, sweet English summer, it manages to.

In 1985 he sends down more overs in the Ashes than any other bowler. He takes 31 series wickets – the most on either side – and for Somerset in the County Championship, hits 80 sixes in the season, a record for the competition.

The fifth Test at Edgbaston is the pivotal game. England bat first, and David Gower, the latest bon viveur to try the captaincy on for size, has already stroked a beautiful double hundred when Botham strides out at No.6. He pauses at the crease, takes some vague kind of guard, raises his arms to the fight and takes a half-step down the pitch. The first ball he faces is full, on the stumps, from the young fast bowler Craig McDermott. Botham sees no reason not to extend the hands through it, and into the throng of “nasally know-all Birmingham businessmen” (F. Keating) boozing it up in the pavilion. McDermott’s third ball goes exactly the same way. Botham hits 18 in seven balls. Of all his Ashes avowals, this is the purest and most primitive of them all.

Border is humiliated. He is a stand-up guy and a good friend of Botham’s. At one stage midway through the series, he holds a press conference to publicly defend Botham against the English press. It was that kind of time. Well, no more. No more clubbable losers. No more friendly comradeship. Australian cricket would have to change. It would change.

***

1986/87

First Test, Brisbane – England win by seven wickets

ENGLAND WIN THE SERIES 2-1

By the winter of 1986, England have turned into a rabble. It’s actually quite impressive. From the point of the series-clincher at The Oval in 1985, they will play 11 Test matches and win precisely none of them. Gower will be replaced by Mike Gatting. Botham will be banned for a few months for smoking dope. The Ashes interim has made it harder to ascertain who is meant to be bowling seam. The team that arrives in Australia is a wreck, and nothing in the pre-series practice games suggests otherwise. In one of them, against Western Australia, a profoundly hungover Botham strides purposefully out to the middle without his bat. As a metaphor it’s hard to beat.

The Gabba in Brisbane is a killer venue, a fat yellow thug of a place. Australians like their first Tests to be held here. It’s the ground that best projects their ideals. A win in this one, at the Gabbatoir, would be their seventh in 11 post-war Tests against the English.

November 14, 1986, really should be the first day of the Australian Age.

Border wins the toss and sticks them in. For his new-ball attack Border partners the sneering left-armer Bruce Reid with Mervyn Hughes, selected for just his second Test. There is a feeling that beyond Hughes’ pitter-patter run-up – described in these pages by the great Tony McGowan as looking like he’s dashing for the outside dunny after a bad prawn – lurks a mean and serious fast bowler. Hughes will leave his mark on the Ashes. Just not yet.

Day one is dull. The Yorkshireman Bill Athey goes full Boycott, England lose just two wickets all day. When Athey is finally out on the second morning for 76, England are 198-4. Botham joins Gower in the middle. He’s remembered his bat.

With due solemnity, it’s come to be noted that the once cavalier Botham has started wearing a white helmet. Understandable against Patrick Patterson at Sabina. But New Zealand at The Oval? It looks awkward, clamped down over his locks, like he’s hiding something.

At the Gabba he lets it run free, one last time. He gets going with an imperious pick-up off his legs. A wide hit-me ball from Hughes is carved over backward-square for six. Same over, he stays back in his crease and opens his left side to hit him back over his head, one of those shots that only make sense in the execution, and a quick bumper from Reid is taken off his chin through mid-wicket.

He dominates a century stand with Gower, who ambles down at one stage to remark that while he probably should urge him to slow down, he’s having too much fun watching. A lofted drive off Hughes brings up his hundred, after which Botham basically goes berserk, sticking the next ball, a short one, over the greyhound track at square-leg and pumping the next two over the top. In all, he will take Hughes for 22 in one over. Sated, unburdened, he launches two more sixes off the ‘step-and-fetch-it’ Greg Matthews before hooking Steve Waugh to Merv in the deep. It is his 14th Test hundred. The whole thing has taken just 173 balls. “Savour him,” says Bob Willis on commentary.

Just for old times, he'll slip in with a five-for at Melbourne to win the series, but his work is done. The Brisbane knock is his first Test hundred in almost three years, and the last of its kind. No more. He will jiggle and waddle through the end days, the old prizefighter giving up too late – and irritate Australia one last time at Sydney in the 1992 World Cup – four wickets (Border, clean-bowled) and a quick fifty, thanks for the memories. But the greatness? That’s long thinned out by then.

England have had a few great all-rounders. One of them may yet be about to eclipse them all, if he hasn’t already. But no one did it like Botham. Forget all the rest of it and ask yourself just one question. Just where would English cricket be without him?

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