Botham’s Century: My 100 great cricketing characters. Ian Botham

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       Tom Cartwright

      Tom Cartwright was the man who convinced me I could bowl. Had it not been for him, 383 Test wickets would have had to be taken by someone else. What is more, quite a few slip catches would have gone missing as well.

      Until the day I met Tom at Taunton – I was a callow youth, he a Somerset veteran and England Test player, regarded as the best of his type of medium-pace bowler in county cricket – no matter how much I thought my bowling was worth persevering with, all the coaches I had come across were equally sure it was a waste of time and effort.

      My first experience of this happened at the 1969 England Schools Under-15 festival in Liverpool. In the final trial match to decide who would represent England Schools against the Public Schools, I took six wickets in the innings, a performance I expected would be enough to secure a place. I quickly discovered how wrong I was. My dad, Les, happened to be watching the match near where the selectors were sitting and overheard them describing my efforts as a fluke. I declined their offer of a place as 13th man.

      The situation barely improved once I arrived to join the MCC groundstaff at Lord’s. Chief coach Len Muncer was certain that I should concentrate on my batting alone and although his No. 2, Harry Sharp, was a great supporter of my ability and the way I approached the game, he agreed.

      But Tom took notice of my pleas that I should be considered a genuine all-rounder and told me he saw enough in my bowling to believe I might be right. He told me never to give up or get dispirited. It was music to my ears. He always had time, always had faith in me, and I couldn’t have had a better man to teach me the art of bowling. Tom’s kindness meant that for the first time in my life I was a willing pupil.

      The first things Tom instilled in me were to do with the craft of bowling: staying tall in delivery and keeping the seam position upright. Specifically, he stressed the need to get in tight to the stumps when bowling, and aiming the ball wicket to wicket; he saw that I had a natural outswinger’s action, and that the straighter I delivered the ball down the other end, the more pronounced the effect of the slightest movement and therefore the more problems for the batsmen.

      He also encouraged me to try and get a yard or two of extra pace out of my action, and it was a combination of that pace and swing that enabled me to get out the best batsmen in the world in my heyday. As time passed, he taught me the subtleties of disguising which way I was going to swing the ball; a complete education, in other words.

      Later, after the operation on my back forced me to remodel and rethink my action, Tom’s advice was more about how to cope psychologically with the real blow of not being able to bowl the way I wanted to, and it helped me to squeeze a couple more years out of my career as a Test all-rounder than would otherwise have been possible. He told me I had to be realistic about what my body would allow me to do, to forget about trying to be the bowler I had been and imagine that I was beginning a new career as though the previous one had never happened. And never to let a batsman think just because I wasn’t as quick as I used to be that I didn’t believe I could get him out.

      He told me that I should concentrate on line and length, keeping things tight and boring the batsman into making an error. He encouraged me to try to think what it would be like to be batting against that kind of bowling. ‘Imagine you have not had anything to hit for three overs,’ he suggested. ‘It wouldn’t take much for you to try something different and then the bowler is in business.’ It was sound advice, and applying it during the 1992 World Cup helped me to finish the tournament as England’s most economical bowler.

      As for the slip catching, Tom and I discussed on many occasions the best place for me to stand. Generally speaking, I felt that most slip fielders stood too deep against fast bowling. To me, too many chances went begging because they didn’t carry, very few because they sailed over a slipper’s head. This wasn’t exactly a popular view, and granted, your reflexes needed to be wasp-sharp. I told Tom that I would rather take a chance and drop the ball than stand too deep and the ball fail to carry. Tom simply said to me that if I felt that way I should ignore what others thought and just go out and prove them wrong. I took a bit of stick over the years for adopting that advanced position. But I took a few sharp chances that I’m sure wouldn’t have reached me if I’d stayed put.