THERE IS I confess a flutter of apprehension as I wait to face Ian

THERE IS, I confess, a flutter of apprehension as I wait to face Ian Botham. The last time we met, at Edgbaston four years ago, I incurred his wrath by asking a question, deemed inappropriate, about his son Liam. The wrath of Botham is not pretty, although at least he didn’t chase me round a car park in a fury, as he is famously said to have done the former Australian captain Ian Chappell. I know it’s history, but I can’t resist raking that one up “I was only a kid,” protests Botham “I don’t give a stuff about Ian Chappell There were so many stories. I was even meant to have threatened him with a glass.” He snorts.

“The day I need a glass to sort out Ian Chappell is the day I really have got to worry.”
It is comforting, in a way, to find some of the old macho menace in an otherwise somewhat mellowed Ian Botham. We are at the county cricket ground in Southampton, watching England’s final World Cup warm-up game, against Hampshire. For 20 minutes or so, I hover at the back of the Sky commentary box, just behind Botham and David Gower Bob Willis and Paul Allott are also there. Botham leads the banter, taking the mick out of Gower’s socks, someone else’s cardie, the stance of one of the Hampshire batsmen “Look, it’s ****ing John Wayne,” he says Everyone laughs. Mellower, to be sure, but Botham is still cock of the walk.He played in two World Cup finals. The first, against the West Indies in 1979, he can hardly remember.

“I think Collis King and Viv Richards blasted us round the ground, but that’s about it. Nobody expected us to win.” He is still gutted, however, that England lost the 1992 final to Pakistan.”We were the best team by a league in that World Cup but we were burnt out. We’d had a hard tour of New Zealand and, instead of having a rest in the two weeks before the World Cup, we were made to play stupid meaningless games of cricket among ourselves So the injuries and niggles didn’t go away The management got it all wrong Mainly Graham Gooch. I told him at the time that I didn’t believe in naughty-boy nets, and some of us didn’t need to run round fields. But he was dogmatic, stubborn, and it cost some of us what should have been the icing on the cake of our careers.”Gooch still looms large in the England set-up, but Botham at least has faith in the chairman of selectors, David Graveney “Grav treats people like adults,” he says.