The Botham Report. Ian Botham
Smith, the Board attempted to put a rather different complexion on affairs. In their statement announcing Dexter’s resignation, they said: ‘Mr Dexter had already informed the Chairman and senior officers of the Board prior to start of the current Test series that he was not seeking re-election after March 1994. Furthermore, Mr Dexter had previously volunteered to finish in the autumn of 1993 to give a new chairman more time to settle in before the next home season. It is this suggestion that the Board has now adopted.’
In fact this was news to almost all the members of the executive committee and quite clearly neither Middleton nor the majority of his county chairmen, if any, had been let in on the secret.
Had they known earlier that Dexter was intending to stand down, it is almost certain that his critics would have allowed him to go quietly and with dignity. By keeping the lid on over his intentions, Dexter and the Board had left themselves exposed. No one should be surprised that they did, however. By now most observers had long since given up attempting to understand the mysteries of Lord Ted and Lord’s.
‘What chiefly annoyed, depressed and irritated me about the Illingworth years was not that one man had the responsibility, but that the man given the responsibility was the wrong man.’
A funny thing happened in March 1997. The English cricket authorities put the responsibility for selecting their Test team in the hands of people who still paid full fare on the buses.
Twelve months on from the leadership contest he would almost certainly have won but was prevented from entering, there were no such problems for David Graveney this time.
Graveney, the overwhelming choice of the counties, was elected unopposed as Chairman of the Selectors only a week or so after England arrived back from their 1996–97 winter tour to Zimbabwe and New Zealand. The ECB management committee then demonstrated how much they’d learned from the Illingworth regime (and those of Ted Dexter and Peter May before him) about appointing selectors who had quit playing the game between twenty and one hundred and twenty years beforehand, by inviting two current players, Graham Gooch and Mike Gatting, to join Graveney on the selection committee.
Some observers found it strange to say the least that three men who so obviously and publicly turned their back on English cricket when signing up for the rebel tours to South Africa (Graveney had been the manager of Gatting’s 1990 tourists), should now be entrusted with the responsibility of picking England’s Test side. While I can sympathize with those who believe that those who walked away from English cricket in search of the krugerrand may have been welcomed back too quickly and too readily into the mainstream of English cricket, there is no doubt that on purely cricketing grounds, the three men possessed the kind of knowledge and experience of the modern game I consider absolutely vital. The most amazing aspect of all this, of course, is that it took so long for those running English cricket to realise the necessity of having current although senior players involved in the selection of the national side. At the end of a decade during which the ultimate responsibility for the picking of England sides was in the hands of men whose first instinct was to complain that things were not like they were in their day, such a move meant that players now knew that they were to be judged by men who spoke the same language and played the same game.
I still don’t believe this new system is perfect. I would far rather the final responsibility for the selection and discipline of the England side be put in the hands of one man, a ‘supremo’ if you like, adequately paid for being the person who takes the pat-on-the-back when things go right, and the knives in the back when things go wrong. One of the very few things on which I agreed with Illingworth is that the chairman of selectors should be the man in front of whom the buck stops. Apart from the fact that in his case he only adhered to the theory behind this principle rather than the practice of it, what chiefly annoyed, depressed and irritated me about the Illingworth years was not that one man had the responsibility, but that the man given the responsibility was the wrong man.
Ray Illingworth was appointed Chairman of Selectors in March 1994. From that time until the time when he officially retired after presiding over the selection of the England winter tour parties to Zimbabwe and New Zealand in September 1996, Illingworth was just the kind of high-profile chairman the Board had wanted. In fact he was rarely out of the newspapers, either justifying his latest unilateral selection policy or slagging-off players like Devon Malcolm, Angus Fraser, Robin Smith, Alec Stewart, and even the captain Mike Atherton. As time passed Illingworth became so voluble in his criticism of them, that the prevailing feeling towards him of many of the England players was that they couldn’t trust him as far as they could throw him.
More than one player told me that Illingworth would often say one thing to their faces and another behind their backs. In the end, most of them couldn’t wait to see his back moving through the exit door.
His battles with the captain Mike Atherton were the constant theme, or some might say running joke of his chairmanship. And even after he had finally disappeared from view at the end of the summer of 1996, he still wouldn’t give it or Atherton a rest. Atherton must have been feeling bad enough at England’s failure to convert obvious supremacy into victory in the first Test of the 1997 winter series in New Zealand at Auckland. He expected to take criticism for the fact that having got the Kiwis on the ropes they couldn’t deliver the knockout blow and he was prepared for it. What he wouldn’t have been ready for (who would?) was direct criticism from the man who was still nominally chairman of selectors.
Cue Raymond, bursting into print in his column in the Daily Express the day after the match had ended in a draw, laying the blame for the shortcomings of England’s attack fairly and squarely at the door of the England captain. He wrote, ‘Mike Atherton must take much of the blame for England’s unbelievable failure to beat New Zealand. His lacklustre, unimaginative captaincy and some awful bowling, lay at the heart of another alarming debacle.
‘It is a sadness to say so,’ continued Illingworth, ‘having worked so closely with Mike over the past few years, but if this carries on, there will be no alternative to replacing him as England captain.’
If such a direct attack carried out in the pages of the national press sounds faintly familiar, it should. Perhaps the most extraordinary episode took place just before and just after England left for their three-month tour of South Africa in the winter of 1995.
A week before the team departed each player received a letter from Tim Lamb, then the Cricket Secretary of the Test and County Cricket Board and number two to Chief Executive A C Smith. It informed the players of Illingworth’s stipulations over what would and would not be acceptable in terms of public comment through the media. Where a simple ‘mind your language’ would have sufficed, the players were issued with something that sounded like a directive from George Orwell’s ‘Thought Police’ It read: ‘I would emphasize to you that from the date of receipt of this letter you must not make or concur or directly or indirectly assist in making any public statement whatsoever regarding the tour or any members of the tour party without the prior consent of the Board’s PR manager Richard Little.
‘Public statement means writing a book, writing for the press, public speaking, broadcasting, or giving an interview of any kind.
‘Ray has stipulated that no player will be permitted to write any national or local newspaper article of any sort, including any diary piece either prior to or during the tour.’
Yet within days the players came up against Illingworth’s habit of enforcing one rule for them and another, completely contradictory one for himself. On the day before Atherton and his men were due to leave for South Africa, the Sun newspaper printed the first of three articles entitled ‘The Boycott and Illingworth Tapes’.
In them, Illingworth revealed confidential information concerning Atherton, including his likes and dislikes among the current England players.
The headline