Come here, Botham

Letters

Vol. 8 No. 19 · 6 November 1986

From Rod Edmond

SIR: Is Paul Foot going soft? His review of Keating’s book about Botham (LRB, 9 October) certainly illustrates his own point that once you have caught the cricket bug it eats away at your better judgment. It is not just the shifting balance between batting and bowling which makes cricket fascinating. It is also the fine balance between the team and the individual. Unlike tennis or golf, cricket is a team game. Unlike football or rugby, members of this team when batting or bowling perform individually. With the exception of Boycott, Botham has, more than any other cricketer of recent times, upset this fine balance. Viv Richards is both the finest batsman in the world and a working member of the West Indian team. He practices as regularly as his team-mates. He will even do duty as 12th man. Botham’s attitude to the mundane side of a cricketer’s working life is conspicuously different. Foot romanticises the all-rounder, but Hadlee has shown it is possible to be exciting without being selfish.

It is too easy to blame all Botham’s problems on the dinosaurs at Lords and the jackals of the popular press. As cricket belatedly emerges from its feudal phase, Botham is the game’s foremost example of the early merchant capitalist – historically necessary perhaps, but hardly the proletarian hero depicted by Foot. The big earners of modern English cricket have done little for their colleagues in the county game. Money rules, and Botham has made quite as much out of the popular press as they have out of him. His refusal to play in South Africa is admirable, but he is not the only Tory opposed to sporting links with South Africa – nor is he the only cricketer to refuse a large sum to play with apartheid. Almost certainly no one else has been offered a million pounds (is this figure really accurate?), but in the case of South Africa I can’t see the difference between 20 and 30 pieces of silver.

No one doubts that Botham has a big heart, and that it is often in the right place. He also has a big head, and too often doesn’t appear able to see the game for himself. He has been shamefully treated by sections of the press, but my sympathy for him disappears whenever I hear his belligerently self-righteous replies. He seems to believe that he should be exempt from the treatment that other gifted, media-blown sportsmen and women suffer.

Foot’s description of Keating as ‘the country’s top sports writer by a long distance’ also surprises me. Wasn’t it Keating who wrote in mitigation of Boycott and the other mercenaries? His writing is notoriously sexist and he seems to share, with Frank Richards as described by Orwell, the view that all foreign countries are intrinsically comic. Perhaps Foot feels that politics and sports writing shouldn’t be mixed. But on the game itself, Keating is not in the same league as his Guardian predecessor Arlott, or his colleagues Engel and Selvey. He cannot keep himself out of his writing. His accounts of cricket are always collapsed back into his own life in a way – unlike Arlott, for example – that does nothing to illuminate the game: we only learn about Keating. In this respect he has a good deal in common with Botham. And the overwriting noted by Foot is not peculiar to this book. Abuse of adjectives is the hallmark of Keating’s journalism.

Rod Edmond
University of Kent, Canterbury