YOU get a good idea of what to expect right from the start of Ian Botham's autobiography. If the sub-title 'Don't Tell Kath' doesn't give the game away, a candid roasting in chapter one of Ted Dexter, the chairman of the Test board of selectors who brought Botham's international cricketing career to a close, certainly sets the tone.
This may be a book about a cricketer, but there's going to be more than just a remembrance of his time at the top of an exacting sport.
Ian Botham has always been more than a remarkable sportsman. He is a headline maker, often for the wrong reasons, a provocateur, a brawler, a stubborn and fiercely loyal friend, an unforgiving enemy and a man who now wants to explain his actions, justify most of them and, most importantly it seems to him, to apologise to his wife. She certainly deserves it.
Dexter's tongue-lashing starts on page 16. The introductory passages, the thanks, the acknowledgements take up the first 12, leaving no time for a soft start, no early remembrances of a little boy with his cricket bat in the back garden - they are dealt with later. First comes the serious business. Dexter is hit for six just four pages into the book proper.
There follows throughout this entertaining exercise in self-justification, similar denouncements of: young players today, they expect everything on a plate; Geoffrey Boycott, too slow and too selfish; Somerset County Cricket Club, Botham's first sporting home, for their disloyalty to his colleagues Viv Richards and Joel Garner; Peter Roebuck, for aiding and abetting that crime; the Queensland State side, they sacked him; the MCC, they didn't appreciate him; the cricketing authorities, they are not offering the best way forward; Durham County - his last team - for being penny-pinching; Imran Khan, for cheating; Graham Gouch, for thoughtless captaincy; Merv Hughes, for intimidating the opposition and Ian Chappell for, well, being Ian Chappell.
Then there are the many brushes with the law - both of cricket and of the land - to be explained, the admissions of drug-taking (a minor matter, he says, and hearing the details you have to agree), the many scrapes in pubs, clubs, on a plane and, famously, with Chappell (mostly provoked by others, he claims, with a consistent, wide-eyed innocence) and the dressing-room pranks that endeared him to many, but must have infuriated a few.
After all, maybe a professional sportsman out to play an important game does not see the humour in having heating cream put in his jockstrap, even if it makes a fine anecdote to be told later. Or a fellow player having his hotel door charged down because he doesn't want to go out for a night's drinking.