by Ian Smith

HEAD ON: IAN BOTHAM AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Ian Botham (Ebury Press, £18.99)

Ian Botham was once a hero - cricket's Jonny Wilkinson, scourge of the Aussies, and the biggest household name the game has known since the days of W.G. Grace.

Head On covers much the same ground as the 1994 autobiography Don't Tell Kath (well, it would, wouldn't it), bringing his story up to date with accounts of his "calling", the charity walks, which to date have raised more than £10m, and have enabled scientists to bring the survival rate for leukaemia up from 20 per cent to 80 per cent.

The chapters covering this aspect of his remarkable life are, as you'd imagine, inspiring, although my favourite passage in the book concerned Botham sending his son Liam away to an Aussie fishing mate as his father felt the boy needed "to be around men more".

The ten-year-old spent the summer as a deckhand on a fishing boat off the Brisbane coast. The future rugby international proved himself a chip off the old block.

The memories and exploits of his playing career do bear a re-read lest we should ever forget. He was the "old Freddie Flintoff" - with bells on. He held sway over all comers (bar the mighty and intimidating West Indies) for a full decade.

Off the field, he was cricket's Olly Reed; beer, brawls and birds, or so Fleet Street's more tawdry papers would have had us believe - those same papers that Botham wrote columns for, and who now laud him as Sir Beefy. The irony isn't lost on him; an intelligent, but straightforward man, whose deeds have sometimes rather masked this fact.

Botham is still a hero. In 'retirement' he has topped the colossal achievements of his playing days with his charity fundraising. It's quite a story.

Sir Ian Botham will be signing books in Borders, Oxford, on Tuesday.