Hello! in hardback

This is nothing to do with 149 not out at Headingley 20 years ago, nor even that resplendent 161 for Worcestershire against the West Indians in 1991, a highly satisfying sign-off to a ravishing 14-year international career. Nor is this book another dreary, turn-of-century, pulpable potboiler of cricket history. Instead it is a collection of 100 profiles, mostly endearing, of a variety of folk - all men - whom England's greatest all-round cricketer has come across over the last three decades.

For starters, all the usual suspects are rounded up. There's Viv ("not so much my friend as my brother"), Boycs ("great player, strange bloke") and Lambie's "courage bordering on insanity", plus Closey, AB, Big Bird, Dolly and so on. As a fast bowler "only DK was the equal of MM", though fastest of all was Thommo. As an opener Sunil was "simply the best", as was "billion-dollar brain" Brearley as a captain.

There are two particularly rewarding essays on David Gower and Graham Gooch, those two mighty different giants, and some refreshingly worthwhile monographs on the unsung Chris Tavare, Les and Bob Taylor, Graeme Hick, Dereks Randall and Pringle, and Muttiah - "is there a happier man playing cricket on the planet?" - Muralitharan. Botham has never been a grousing "in-my-dayer" and, of other moderns, Michael Atherton and Darren Gough receive red-blooded and beefy bear-hugs.

Botham's collaborator is again the talented Peter Hayter. Their liaison began with the 1994 autobiog Botham: Don't Tell Kath which was, before Dickie Bird squawked to the top of the ratings, apparently cricket publishing's best of all best-sellers. The format of Botham's Century is far more rewarding than that 500-page "official memoir", where they were obliged to cross t's and dot i's on a pile of accrued, but necessary, stodge - even though all most readers wanted to see was a few clearly defined trees, not dense wood and thickets of justification.

As well our hero, who turned 46 on November 24, is now that much more mellow. Having tramped the length and breadth of the British isles, and up and down a few Alps, to raise many millions for leukaemia research - he writes a touching profile of the charity's director Douglas Osborne - Botham is most audible these days in Sky broadcasting turrets worldwide. Against predictions, he has become just about the best - and certainly the most measured and least hysterical - of the muster at the mike.

His comradely generosity, always tops of his many appealing qualities, shines through in this book, just as it does in the commentary box. Several of his equally famed foes - "an enemy of my friend is doubly my enemy" - are granted absolution, and he enthusiastically apologises for once doubting the talents and motives of Ted Dexter, Nasser Hussain and even his old High Court adversary, Imran Khan. But he can still find no lenient word for Peter Roebuck - and certainly not for the despised Hansie Cronje, that "devious charlatan".

There are two poignant and still grieving memoirs to Botham's late journalist soul-brothers, Chris Lander and John Arlott ("Come to Alderney, Ian, and bring your thirst with you"). The buccaneer in him can still seethingly rail against the selectors' "scandalous" treatment of Robin Smith, while calm reason can nominate Vic Marks as England's new chairman of selectors and back Clive Lloyd's West Indians to beat Steve Waugh's Aussies.

Just as emphatically, I would back this timely and readable hardbacked Hello! to rattle the Christmas cash-tills till they're dizzy. Wives, sisters, nieces and aunts will be queuing to tick it off their gift lists. As well as a pithy bedside indipper sometimes in the Waqar class, the added bonus is some affable Beefy outswerve which serves up delightful vignettes on characters like Douglas Bader, the one-legged wartime kite-flier; Karim Din, owner of the "the best Indian in England", the Indus in Doncaster; and Laurie Brown and `Rooster' Roberts, the two physios who gallantly helped tend the big battered body and give it half a dozen more years in the game after surgeon John Davies had skilfully put it together again in the mid-1980s.

Hooray for them ... and hooray for him. Oh, how the English game misses him still. Mellower he might be, but who else would declare that Mick Jagger "knows far more about cricket than some of the old farts who have ended up selecting England teams over the years"? That's my boy!

Botham's Century
by Ian Botham with Peter Hayter
CollinsWillow, 2001