Botham’s Century: My 100 great cricketing characters. Ian Botham
for England there. I was less happy following the second Test in Perth, after damaging an intercostal muscle. That’s basically a rib injury, which affects most bowlers at some time in their career; it’s one of the most frustrating because it takes its own time to heal and simply cannot be rushed.
I was very depressed because I knew this was a bad strain. Laurie confirmed that. ‘You’ve done a good job there, Ian. This could take eight weeks to clear.’ Waiting on the sidelines for the remainder of the tour was not in my game plan. I gave Laurie one of my special hugs and informed him gently that we could do better than that. Laurie realized this was not a time to argue, and just nodded. He was brilliant. I can’t remember if we had any other injury problems at the time, but other patients hardly got a look in. We had up to half-a-dozen sessions a day, and I always had the last appointment. That’s when a bottle of Scotch would appear out of a drawer or out of my cricket coffin. Laurie was a Scot. He played rugby on the wing for Musselburgh, and he certainly enjoyed a dram. Every night we went through the same ritual after three fingers of the liquid gold were poured out.
‘Do you want any water with that?’ I would ask.
‘Water … water. There’s enough water in there already,’ was the consistent answer.
Whatever the reasons, these intensive sessions worked. As well as all the ultra-sound treatment and various rubs, I would be in the swimming pool for a couple of hours a day. I only missed one Test, the third in Adelaide, and was declared fit to play after a month, just in time for the Boxing Day Test in Melbourne. England were still leading 1–0 in the Ashes series with two to play. ‘Fit to play’ was rather a loose term. I was about 75 per cent fit, but Laurie and I reckoned that was about as good as it was going to get in the time available. That was just as well, because my opening partner, Graham Dilley dropped out on the morning of the MCG Test and was replaced by Gladstone Small. In the end, ‘Stoney’ and I took five wickets apiece, and the Ashes were retained by an innings inside three days. I would never have made it without Laurie’s time and consideration.
All physios play the Father Confessor role to cricketers to some extent – there’s a strong and strange bond because you rely on them so much – but Laurie held a special place among England players during my time. The physio hears all sorts of things from players lying on the treatment couch. It’s not only physical grumbles that cricketers want reassurance about. The bottom line is trust. You have to trust that the physio’s solution to an injury problem is the right one. The best physios are the ones who don’t bullshit when out of their depth or dealing with a problem outside their area of expertise. Injuries and strains do seem to be more difficult to diagnose these days, even with all that sophisticated machinery. The good physios are the ones who refer you immediately to an expert consultant or clinic, and are not too proud to admit they don’t know the answer. Laurie was one of the good ones.
Finding a specialist abroad can be difficult and you are often taken to specialists on recommendation. Sometimes you strike lucky, as when Graham Gooch was suffering from a finger infection during the 1990–91 Ashes tour. Laurie soon realized the problem was too tricky for him to solve and within hours of sending him to see the surgeon, Randall Sach, Goochie was under the knife. This quick action probably saved him from losing his hand. On other occasions, cracks and fractures have not been picked up on X-rays. By the time of the 1992 World Cup, Laurie was as familiar with my creaking body as I was. Back, shoulders, knees and ankles had all been heavily strapped at various times. Laurie said that as soon as he bandaged me in one place, it would force the trouble to emerge somewhere else. He was convinced there was going to be a day of reckoning – when some part of me would just explode. Laurie’s hope was that he wouldn’t be around when it happened.
There was a price to pay for Laurie’s friendship and assistance. That price concerns a football team from the Unibond Premier League called Stalybridge Celtic. Laurie lived next door to the ground and had a seemingly interminable supply of stories. If I were ever to go on Mastermind – stop chortling at the back there – that bloomin’ club would be my specialist subject. For years and years, Laurie boasted proudly that Stalybridge were on their way up. I’ve waited and waited, but, astonishingly, as yet local rivals Manchester United haven’t been threatened.
Laurie was the daddy to the team in my time. He was a generation older than most of the lads, and had been around a bit. When we sought advice, it was offered in that gentle Scottish accent and with that canny way of his. He was always available for a chat. Even I didn’t want to go out every night, and Laurie never complained about me or anyone else invading his room for an evening of philosophizing or talking nonsense. He put his life, as well as his career, on the line with me during the 1992 World Cup. He was the management’s sacrificial lamb when I wanted a night out. They reasoned that, unlike any of my colleagues, Laurie and his health were expendable. Not as far as I was concerned.
Tom Cartwright was the man who convinced me I could bowl. Had it not been for him, 383 Test wickets would have had to be taken by someone else. What is more, quite a few slip catches would have gone missing as well.
Until the day I met Tom at Taunton – I was a callow youth, he a Somerset veteran and England Test player, regarded as the best of his type of medium-pace bowler in county cricket – no matter how much I thought my bowling was worth persevering with, all the coaches I had come across were equally sure it was a waste of time and effort.
My first experience of this happened at the 1969 England Schools Under-15 festival in Liverpool. In the final trial match to decide who would represent England Schools against the Public Schools, I took six wickets in the innings, a performance I expected would be enough to secure a place. I quickly discovered how wrong I was. My dad, Les, happened to be watching the match near where the selectors were sitting and overheard them describing my efforts as a fluke. I declined their offer of a place as 13th man.
The situation barely improved once I arrived to join the MCC groundstaff at Lord’s. Chief coach Len Muncer was certain that I should concentrate on my batting alone and although his No. 2, Harry Sharp, was a great supporter of my ability and the way I approached the game, he agreed.
But Tom took notice of my pleas that I should be considered a genuine all-rounder and told me he saw enough in my bowling to believe I might be right. He told me never to give up or get dispirited. It was music to my ears. He always had time, always had faith in me, and I couldn’t have had a better man to teach me the art of bowling. Tom’s kindness meant that for the first time in my life I was a willing pupil.
The first things Tom instilled in me were to do with the craft of bowling: staying tall in delivery and keeping the seam position upright. Specifically, he stressed the need to get in tight to the stumps when bowling, and aiming the ball wicket to wicket; he saw that I had a natural outswinger’s action, and that the straighter I delivered the ball down the other end, the more pronounced the effect of the slightest movement and therefore the more problems for the batsmen.
He also encouraged me to try and get a yard or two of extra pace out of my action, and it was a combination of that pace and swing that enabled me to get out the best batsmen in the world in my heyday. As time passed, he taught me the subtleties of disguising which way I was going to swing the ball; a complete education, in other words.
Later, after the operation on my back forced me to remodel and rethink my action, Tom’s advice was more about how to cope psychologically with the real blow of not being able to bowl the way I wanted to, and it helped me to squeeze a couple more years out of my career as a Test all-rounder than would otherwise have been possible. He told me I had to be realistic about what my body would allow me to do, to forget about trying to be the bowler I had been and imagine that I was beginning a new career as though the previous one had never happened. And never to let a batsman think just because I wasn’t as quick as I used to be that I didn’t believe I could get him out.
He told me that I should concentrate on line and length, keeping things tight and boring the batsman into making an error. He encouraged me to try to think what it would