Sport Beefy: Spin reviews Botham’s Christmas offering

My Sporting Heroes
By Ian Botham (Mainstream, £18.99)

England’s greatest cricketer of the modern age is also one of our most prolific authors: three autobiographies, an illustrated memoir, ‘The Botham Report’ (a 1997 blueprint for the English game), various tour diaries and bedside miscellanies, two books about fishing and ‘Botham’s Century’ – his 100 greatest cricketers. Not to mention writing the foreword to Robin Askwith’s autobiography… 

Targeted like a bullet at the Dad gift market, ‘My Sporting Heroes’ is Botham’s hardback assessment of 50 British and Irish greats of the modern era – most of whom are at the very least acquaintances of the great man: he played football against George Best and golf with Padraig Harington; dined with Sir Alex Ferguson, and has been drunk under the table against all expectations – including his own – by Jason Leonard.

Turning out books as he does, you might expect this one to be tossed off, but there are no cracks here: Botham is the ultimate Sport Billy, keeping up with English football from hotels on cricket tours around the world and comparing notes with Nigel Mansell at charity dinners. Owning race horses in the ’80s took him into another sporting world (Willie Carson and John Francome are included here); and then there’s the rugby, for which he developed a  passion in his late teens, later developed by following his son Liam’s career. 

Inevitably, the talk of focus, determination and overcoming failure gets repetitive in places but this is a genuinely absorbing read: his appraisals of Geoff Boycott and Graham Gooch are especially intriguing. Botham actually blames Gooch’s fitness regime for making the team too tired to win the 1992 World Cup final, one of many revealing details. 

The inclusion of Allan Lamb may bring a rolling of the eyes, as the Beef acknowledges: “His position here does stem a little from how well I got to know him as a bloke as well as a player,” he concedes, before writing about Lamby’s bravery (and six centuries) against the fearsome attack of the 1980s West Indies.

But the only real gripe a Beefy fan might have is at the selection of ‘Lord Sebastian Coe’ here ahead of the Bothamesque Steve Ovett. Why, Beefy, why?