I had the experience of playing with or against any number of famous players, and if I had a mentor in the professional game, it would have to be Ray Illingworth. As someone who had done little more than give it a swish at King’s School, Canterbury, it was a good education to learn the serious aspect of the game from a man with one of the harder noses in professional cricket. There was a good atmosphere at Grace Road under lily’s captaincy, and it was also a benefit for me to launch my career in one of the better county sides around at that time. He had his foibles, and the amount of mickey-taking he took from the other players without it in any way undermining his authority reflected a happy dressing room. In some ways, the club never recovered from his return to Yorkshire in 1978, and the way things turned out, I wonder whether Illy regretted leaving. However, he was never one for power sharing, and as Mike Turner was very much in charge at Grace Road, the chance to become player-manager at Yorkshire rather than remain answerable to Mike at Leicester was the more attractive option.
It’s ironic to think back now that Mike actually gave me £5 a week more than I was asking for when I signed my first contract in 1975, because in all my time at Leicester, the prime topic of conversation was how little we were paid in contrast to other counties. Mike, who more or less ran the club, was impossible to crack on wages – on almost anything come to that – and he was the sort of man who commanded either love or hate in his business dealings. He was known as the Ayatollah, because he had to have a finger in every pie that came out of the oven at Grace Road. Whether it was picking the side, or some piffling request from a gateman, Mike had a say in it, and he took such a work load on himself that he only really slowed down (and then only minimally) when he had a heart attack. As an administrator he was second to none, knew his cricket, and as far as I was concerned he was very supportive. If you were on the wrong side of Mike he was a hard opponent, but if you were on the right side he was a good friend and ally. Much of the good work he did for the players, myself included, was done quietly behind the scenes and with no great drama.
The player I was closest to at Leicester, both in cricketing outlook and as a kindred spirit, was Brian Davison. Davo was a larger than life character, and no-one could possibly have guessed from his early wild man days at Grace Road that he would end up as a member of parliament in Hobart, Tasmania, which is where he and his family emigrated after a long career at Leicestershire. I assume his canvassing methods are slightly different to those he employed in the Rhodesian army, when the members of the opposition were dangled from helicopters to help them in conversation. He was a destroyer of a cricket ball, and a phenomenally strong man – nor would you aim to get on the wrong side of him. When his nostrils flared, it was time to make yourself scarce. He liked a drink, smoked like a chimney, but there was a highly cultured side to him as well, and he became, among other things, quite an expert in antiques. He was appointed captain of the club in 1980, a short engagement that ended with too many adverse umpires’ reports, but I loved batting with him for the confidence he exuded at the crease. I loved driving with him rather less, as he tended to solve traffic problems with 90 m.p.h. excursions on the wrong side of the road. On his day, he would murder any bowler, and although he now lives in Tasmania, we still keep in touch.
I also learned a lot from Roger Tolchard, not least in refusing to play him at golf for money. His will to win at everything manifested itself in a self-appointed handicap of about 18 when he was closer to scratch. Tolly, who was my landlord in those early days at Leicester, was a fabulous one-day batsman, who was perhaps never quite the same player after having his cheekbone caved at Newcastle on the 1978-79 tour to Australia. He was not the most popular player on the circuit, as he consistently got up people’s noses, and as a teetotaller never gave himself the chance to undo the damage in the bar afterwards. However, he was a marvellous influence in our own dressing room, and was always at you about your cricket. I took over from him as captain in 1983 when the club fired him, a decision that he certainly did not expect at the time, and which closed the door on his career with an emphatic thud.
My closest mate in the England team has been Allan Lamb who made his debut about four years after mine. He is the only man I know who has been collared by a policeman on the beat for using a mobile hand-held telephone: he was in a traffic jam on the King’s Road in London and doing about 1 m.p.h. Lamby is a remarkably straight-up-and-down guy, with as large a capacity for having a good time as anyone I’ve met, is an extraordinary good host – dangerously so – and has this huge energy and vitality that rubs off on any dressing room he is in. He has, down the years, been the wheeler-dealer of the England team, having as good an eye for business as he has for a cricket ball. On his day, he is as ruthless a destroyer of good bowling as anyone. Like most South Africans he is fond of the outdoors, and has now become something of the English country squire, always out hunting, fishing and shooting, and it was Lamby who was with me when I first went down the Cresta Run, another little part-time diversion that we will come back to later.
Lamby and Ian Botham are similar characters in many respects, and there is a common denominator in my relationship with them in that I can’t keep up with either after dark. He has never shirked a challenge, and the fact that this applies off the field as well as on it has dropped him into the fertilizer once or twice. ‘Both’ is quite a vulnerable character, who tends to overreact if people set out to rub him up the wrong way in a bar, as many have, but he can also be as good as gold. He’s much brighter than people give him credit for, and because he has done so many things, there is a lot of depth to him. Again, contrary to public opinion, he does not down the nearest bottle of Beaujolais nouveau in one gulp (although I dare say he could) but is actually quite a discerning wine buff. He’s exceptionally loyal to his friends, and can be equally hard on people he has no time for. It is perfectly possible, also, for people to change categories with him, and one example was Leicestershire’s Les Taylor. Botham had no time for him at all until the 1985-86 West Indies tour, but when he found out what a character Les was, they became bosom buddies. It was said that I had problems captaining him, but rarely ever did, and I always enjoyed playing with him.
I enjoyed playing with Graham Gooch until that last tour to Australia in 1990-91, but we have been good mates down the years, and I have nothing but admiration for what he has achieved for himself. He is, as most people are aware, an intensely private man, extremely shy with people he doesn’t know, and has become more and more dedicated over the years. He was a good bit wilder in his younger days, which might surprise some people, but as time has gone on he has become immersed in the game, and in making money out of it. He is still a social animal, with a dry sense of humour, but can be horribly intransigent at times. He always resented the punishment that was dished out to him for going to South Africa in 1981, and it is either an irony or a triumph for his character, depending on your point of view, that a cricketer who was banned for three years by his country has now become a national figurehead. Whether, when we drifted apart in Australia, he thought I had become a subversive influence I don’t know, but it cooled our relationship and this has left me a little sad.
Whenever I have come in for criticism during my career, I have invariably been compared, unfavourably, with Geoff Boycott. Why could I not have been as single minded as he was? The answer is I don’t really know, but as I said before, I might possibly have entertained a few more people than he did. He always liked being the centre of attention (when he’s on TV he always speaks louder than anyone else) and would like to be loved more than perhaps he is. He has always been an enigma. He can be very rational, he has an immense knowledge of the game, he’s a very fine analyst of techniques and of situations within a game, and he is, potentially, one of the world’s great commentators. He certainly has the knowledge and understanding, but unfortunately you have to temper that with a very one-eyed view of the rest of the world, which largely centres around himself. I’ve never managed to finish one of his books (although in fairness this applies to most books I pick up) but the gist always seems to be: ‘I’d have done this, I’d have done that,’ and all the rest of it. Everything is based on G. Boycott. There are the archetypal Boycott stories, such as the time he reckoned he had cracked