Burn a little brighter now

A final, sort of free association addendum to the post below about Trevor 'The Boil' Bailey: as ever that era of the media brought to mind John Arlott, and then his unlikely, touching and longstanding friendship with Ian Botham, himself a current occupant of 'the comm-box'.

The outsider's view of that friendship is hostage to the public image of Beefy as a no-nonsense man's man whose rare collisions with the written word might occur via something by Tom Clancy. Yet that is to misjudge both men.

They met, according to Botham, when he was a 16 year old at Somerset and he was summoned to lug two of Arlott's hampers into the press box at Taunton. Arlott opened one, which was filled with wine, and asked Botham if he'd ever tried any. He proceeded to uncork several bottles and then the other hamper, which contained cheeses chosen as accompaniments. Botham had met the man he describes as his mentor. The friendship ended many years and many legends later when Arlott died on Alderney at 77. Botham was his neighbour at the time, and would visit him every day.

'At the end when the emphysema took over and he was struggling with speech he had an oxygen mask and I often had to empty his bag for him,' Botham told the Guardian in 2007. 'But he liked me being there because I knew to wait and let him finish his sentences between gasps. I didn't try to say the words for him because I knew how much they mattered.'

Anyone meeting Arlott when they were just 16 might have felt the same. As his obituary in Wisden noted, 'he was a man of deep humanity'. What's more interesting is what Arlott might have seen in Beefy. There was his talent of course, and his Falstaffian love of cricket and life. But there was much more than that. He could, by his own admission, be deeply selfish and annoyingly laddish, and conservative and reactionary. But he is also a man of great heart and loyalty, a man who has spent a lifetime raising millions of pounds for cancer research after spending just one afternoon at a children's hospital, a bloke who inspired equal loyalty in his friends and from others who've never met him.

Botham, you suspect, works quite hard to keep that side of himself hidden. Not everything can be public property. There's something else, too. Arlott did express a regret that he retired from commentary in 1980, and missed the chance to go through '81 with Botham.

Beefy was one of those players who stirred something in the spectator. In a fabulous piece on trying to write a book about the snooker player Jimmy White, Jonathan Rendall says: 'It doesn't really matter what people like Jimmy do; it's how they express it. They have "it", whatever "it" is, in the way that great painters, writers, poets and violinists have it. They're rare. So when they fall, they must be saved. It's a shame no one thought to save [Alex] Higgins - although technically there's still time - but I suppose the same could have been said of Dylan Thomas. That's my theory, anyway'.

Arlott was a friend of Dylan Thomas, as well as an accomplished poet and a connoisseur of wine and cricket and life; in short an aesthete, and he recognised another when he saw one. It's a shame that, with the demise of the pro broadcaster, a player like Beefy might not meet a man like Arlott in similar circumstances again.

Nowt wrong wi' that

A superlative Boycs story:

On one of Ian Botham's first England tours the great man was struggling with form, so Beefy dropped by his hotel room to offer commiserations. Boycott was inside, naked except for his pads. He told Botham to sit on the bed, picked up his bat and demonstrated the famous forward defensive.

'Now tell me what's wrong with that,' Boycs said. 'Nothing, that's what'.

Matty Hayden walks the earth: the Ashes media, mano et mano

'Ah Paris... marvellous. The Louvre... walking up the hill to Montmartre. Fabulous city...'

Matthew Hayden paused. 'One of the great pleasures of coming over here is getting the chance to go to historic places like that.'

And one of the great, and unexpected pleasures of the summer was Matthew Hayden, who split his time between Test Match Special and the Channel Five highlights show, and who, like Kwai Chang Kane, has apparently put aside worldly things to walk the earth instead.

'I went walking around London last night,' he said. 'Summer's night, strolling around the streets, stopping at a couple of pubs for a beer... wonderful'.

For some reason, when I pictured Haydos doing this, he was in his cricket gear, too. And barefoot. As England tipped the balance of the Oval Test by running out Punter and Clarke in consecutive overs, he welcomed Jim Maxwell to the mic by saying, 'Good on ya Jim, I feel like I need another Aussie here at this point. I'm quite emotional...'

The new caring, sharing Hayden still had his sharp side, most notably in his now famous spat with Geoffrey. 

'Your batting emptied grounds, mate,' he said, no doubt out of the side of his mouth while still mentally at first slip. 

Exit Geoffrey, muttering. But thankfully not for long. Boycott got every prediction he made wrong this summer, but that's because they were almost always based on the kind of sound logic that the series refused to obey.

TMS has copped some flak, but the mix of Haydos, Geoffrey and Phil Tufnell made it a joy to listen to. Tufnell is as self-effacing as the two great batsmen are proud. Asked about his greatest fear, while others waffled about planes and spiders, Tuffers deadpanned: 'Mark Waugh'.

Sky opted for Warne as their resident legend, and once you got past the teeth - surely some kind of spin-off from NASA research - he was worth what must have been a reassuringly expensive fee. The real difference in his commentary came in his willingness to stick his neck on the line and call the play. Sky's collective of ex-England captains in the 'comm box' could do nothing but genuflect. Add Ravi Bopara to his list of Test victims. 

Beefy at least had someone to share his jokes about not training and coming in at 5am with. The heirarchy - Sky-erarchy? - revealed itself via the banter. Botham admitted Warnie to the club that contains himself, Michael Holding and sometimes David Gower. Nasser and Athers remain the butt of Beefy humour ['you'd have had about 18 by now wouldn't you Nass?' he'd enquire, just before tea]. Bumble is the mad uncle at the party, capable, like most jokers, of concealing the truth in humour.

Sky's technology is the real star of their show. Hawkeye versus Aleem Dar, super slo-mo versus Asad Rauf were heavyweight contests with only one winner.