Head On: The Autobiography | Ian Botham

And if by his own admission he does not come across as an entirely nice man, one might as well expect to like one’s politicians as like one’s sporting heroes. Anyone who has watched him over the years as a commentator with Sky will be perfectly aware of all his good points, and though in this ‘warts and all’ account of his life he is just a bit too fond of his warts for comfort — too invincibly satisfied with his bull-headedness, too pleased with the childhood nickname ‘Bungalow’ (nothing up top), too impenitently keen to add to the brawling, hard-drinking ‘Beefy’ mythology — there is hardly a page that does not remind one of what England cricket lost when he disappeared from the game. You would probably not want to be married to him, though his wife still is, which says something about both of them. You would not want to rubbish his book and find yourself sitting next to him in the pub. His record over the rebel tours to apartheid South Africa is probably not as unambiguous as he would like it to have been. All in all, though, it is probably best to take him as he is: not something that belongs to the modern cricket world, to a world of bowling coaches, fielding coaches, batting coaches, sports psychologists, physios and an England side made in the image of Paul Collingwood; but something straight out of the pages of Thomas Carlyle — the Hero as Monster, the Hero as Prodigy, the Hero as Smiter. And besides — quite apart from Headingley — we have a great deal to be thankful for. Just think: if Botham had not deliberately run out Boycott in that New Zealand test match 25 years ago, ‘Sir Geoffrey’ would probably still be batting and still in double figures.