Encounters with the Stars

The Old Batsman writes about seeing Shane Watson, Ricky Ponting and Mike Hussey in the street in London.

I can't remember seeing any properly famous cricketers in the street. I don't think Keith Tomlins (of Middlesex and Gloucestershire non-fame) and Kevin Jarvis (the man who once said that if he could bowl at himself it would be 'an amputation job to get the ball out of my hand') really count, although I hope someone out there remembers them.

However, I did once share a Port Elizabeth hotel with the England team and its media pack.

At one point I was walking, alone, down a corridor, and, coming in the other direction, also alone, was Ian Botham. He looked at me, I looked at him. He looked suspicious, I probably just looked sunburnt after a day spent frying in the St.George's Park sunshine. Neither of us said anything, although I had the distinct impression that he expected me to, probably because he was all too used to people thinking they knew him when they didn't and treating him like a lost friend when he hadn't got a clue who they were. I reflected later on our wordless encounter, thinking about the fact that while he'd never consciously seen me before and knew nothing about me, I knew his name, when and where he was born, the names of his wife and children, where he grew up, went to school, and so on and so on. To all intents and purposes I did know him. But then again I didn't.

Another member of my party opened the door of his hotel room to find Bob Willis bowling a tennis ball down the corridor at Mark Ramprakash.

I think he played and missed.

Long Time Coming

I've written more than once about Ian Botham and knighthoods. Once to wonder, as I often had over the years, why he'd never received one, and once, more recently, to welcome the rumours that he was about to do so. Now it's confirmed.

But it all goes back much longer than that. I distinctly remember asking my brother (who was - and still is - a good deal older than me and therefore knew exactly what was going to happen in the world) in the heady days of the summer of 1981 if he thought that Ian Botham would be knighted. He didn't think so and it's taken a hell of a long time - far, far, too long - for things to turn out differently.

As someone who was a young teenager - and a cricket junkie - at the time when Botham was at his best, I have a tendency to go misty-eyed and a bit irrational at times like this, but, as usual, Andrew Miller, whose relative youth probably gives him a bit more objectivity than me, strikes exactly the right note here. I particularly like one sentence: 'Botham has a rightful claim to be England's greatest living sportsman, end of story'.

Rightful claim, Andrew? To some of us it's never been in doubt.