Botham’s Century: My 100 great cricketing characters. Ian Botham
asked.
‘Well, lad. He’d have been caught in the gully,’ said Closey.
Gary Sobers was another who fell victim to Closey’s awesome (some might say foolhardy) disregard for personal well-being, in the 1970 Test at the Oval between England and the Rest of the World. On a featherbed pitch, the best hooker in world cricket was playing John Snow with a stick of rhubarb. Only a madman would have put himself so close at forward short leg. Say no more.
The inevitable moment arrived; Snow bowled a short one, Sobers rocked back and prepared to lever the ball into the middle of the Harleyford Road. Any other cricketer would have hit the deck and hoped for the best. Closey didn’t budge an inch. In the event, Sobers was a fraction too early with the shot, and as everyone else in the ground prepared to trace the flight of the ball over the perimeter wall with the fielder’s head attached to it, Close kept his eyes open and on the ball that travelled from the bottom edge of the bat to the batsman’s hip and into his hands for the catch.
There could be no more graphic proof of his bravery than his performance against a fearsome West Indies pace attack led by Michael Holding in near-darkness on the evening of the third day of the Old Trafford Test of 1976. At 45, 27 years after making his Test debut, Closey had been recalled by skipper Tony Greig to add some experience to the England batting, and some guts too. In a terrifying barrage and without any protective intervention from the umpires, Close and John Edrich took blow after blow on the body. When Close took his shirt off in the dressing room afterwards his chest was covered with black and blue, cricket-ball shaped bruises. ‘Someone take a picture of my medals,’ he urged. Someone did and the resulting photo was one of his most-prized possessions.
A lot of captains talked about leading from the front. With Closey it was more than just talk. He made an art form of it, and I have no hesitation in saying that a lot of what I’ve achieved in the game is down to the principles he drummed into me as a youngster at Somerset. I know that if you asked Viv Richards he would tell you exactly the same.
The first thing he taught us was just how much cricket was played in the mind. Very early in my career at Somerset, when I’d played only a dozen or so matches for the first team, he took me to one side and told me straight out, ‘You should be in the England side.’ Before Viv had even properly established himself in our first team at Taunton Close told him, ‘You are going to be the best batsman in the world.’ And those things rub off. Sure, some might say that such talk could have an adverse effect on a certain type of character. Close’s opinion was that it would only have an adverse effect on the wrong type of character.
For the rest, it was always his intention to instil in you the belief that you were the best. As far as he was concerned, all he needed to say was this: ‘You are better than the bloke at the other end. Now prove it.’ And I recall him saying that to me when I ran in to bowl for the first time to none other than Colin Cowdrey.
Closey retained his total enthusiasm throughout his extraordinary career, and was still leading the Yorkshire Academy XI of promising youngsters well into his sixties. The only two occasions on which I ever saw him anything like flustered had nothing to do with cricket. The first was when I announced that I was going to marry his goddaughter Kathryn Waller when we were both still so young, and the second, at a hotel in Westcliff before a county match against Essex, when I watched him walk straight through a plate-glass sliding-door. It sounded like a bomb had gone off. Miraculously, he escaped with a tiny nick on his hand, just to prove that whether behind a wheel, at madly-close short leg, against Michael Holding’s bouncers in the gloom, or whatever the danger, Closey was a born survivor.
Long after I knocked back Colin Cowdrey’s off-stump as an 18-year-old in a Gillette Cup semi-final, it finally dawned on me: I had bowled one of the greatest ambassadors world cricket has ever known.
I was brought up by my old Somerset captain Brian Close to treat all batsmen alike, and never to be overawed by great reputations taking guard at the other end. All the same, it was a great feather in my cap when I won my personal duel with ‘Kipper’ – later to become Sir Colin Cowdrey, and then Lord Cowdrey of Tonbridge – at Canterbury that afternoon in August 1974.
Sadly for me, there was to be no happy ending, or a trip to Lord’s: Kent won by three wickets and went on to beat Lancashire in a low-scoring final. But to be confronted by one of the game’s great names, and rearrange his off-stump, was a special moment.
Later in my career, I was fortunate enough to get to know Kipper pretty well. We used to enjoy the odd game of golf, and he was as much fun off the pitch as he was an exemplary character on it. It was a terrible moment when, two days before England’s fantastic win at Karachi in December 2000, his son Chris was awakened in the middle of the night with the tragic news that Lord Cowdrey had passed away, and Chris had to fly home from Pakistan.
Just four months earlier, I’d been photographed at Old Trafford with five of the other six Englishmen to reach 100 Test caps: Geoffrey Boycott, David Gower, Alec Stewart, Mike Atherton and Graham Gooch. Colin, the first man to reach that milestone, was unable to attend because he was recovering from a stroke at the time. But to me, he will always be the leader of the magnificent seven.
Colin’s love of the game and his conviction that, no matter how high the stakes, it should be played the right way, encouraged him to become the driving force behind a move to define ‘the spirit of the game’ and have a statement describing it written and included in the laws of cricket. It hurt him deeply when cricketers let themselves down on the field with poor behaviour. And I shudder to think what he would have made of some of what went on during England’s tour to Sri Lanka, or when England took on Pakistan at the start of the 2001 summer.
But while his work as an administrator may bear fruit in the long run, it was his skill as a player that made him one of the best-loved figures in the world game. As a batsman, he was one of the most graceful of any era. His textbook cover drive was a work of art: his timing was so immaculate that he appeared to caress the ball to the boundary. With Peter May, he shared a partnership of 411 against the West Indies at Edgbaston in 1957 which still remains England’s record stand for any wicket in Test matches.
He was also a man of extraordinary courage, and the way he walked out to bat with his broken left arm in plaster at Lord’s in 1963, to save the game when England were nine wickets down against the Windies, is part of cricket folklore. He thought it was all a jolly jape, of course, and he stood at the non-striker’s end for the last over, beaming like a Cheshire cat. On the only occasion I can remember talking to him about it, he told me he would have batted left-handed – using only his right arm – if he’d been called upon to face the bowling.
Only a few months after I’d dismissed him at Canterbury, I can also remember Colin marching out to face Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson – at their ferocious peak – in Perth on the 1974–75 Ashes tour, where he’d been summoned as an emergency replacement for England’s vast platoon of walking wounded. Thommo greeted him with a few snarls, as you would expect, but Colin just doffed his cap and chortled, ‘Good day, I don’t believe we’ve met – the name’s Cowdrey’
At the end of that over, he wandered up the pitch for a chat with his batting partner David Lloyd, like two neighbours chatting over the garden fence. ‘Bumble’ had been ducking Thommo’s 99 mph bouncers on a trampoline pitch for dear life, and was somewhat taken aback when Colin, approaching his 42nd birthday, greeted him with the words, ‘This is rather good fun, isn’t it?’ Bumble replied that he’d been in funnier situations, but together they knuckled down to put on 50-odd runs against some of the fastest bowling ever seen. If Cowdrey had a fault, those who played under him as captain will tell you that he suffered occasionally from bouts of indecision brought on by a totally unwarranted lack of self-confidence. When, during the fourth Test of England’s 1968 tour to the West Indies, Gary Sobers threw down the gauntlet to England by offering them a target of 215 in two-and-three-quarter hours, Colin was so unsure as to whether to go for the runs that it was only the combined efforts of Ken Barrington,