He was happy to take risks, and to accept that the risk-taking was not always going to pay off. This was the price of being an entertainer: he understood it, and we the public were asked to understand as well. He embraced being our champion and loved the power invested in him. It was too good to last. He was too good to last. In The Power and the Glory, featuring exclusive new interviews with over 100 figures in the sport including David Gower, Viv Richards, Graham Gooch, Mike Brearley, Tony Greig and Peter Roebuck, award-winning writer Simon Wilde tells the story of a great piece of British sporting history, one of the greatest: of a man for whom the glamour and the grit came together.
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“A staggering story, extremely well told”
The Independent
“Wilde’s skillful assembly of top sources … enables him to explode a few myths and to shed new light on the ‘Beefy’ so beloved of tabloid caricature”
Neil O’Sullivan, Financial Times
“Simon Wilde, in this perfectly paced and exhaustively researched biography, recalls the magic of that astonishing summer [of 1981]. But he doesn’t neglect the darker side of Botham’s career and character, revealing a more complex and nuanced personality than the gruff, self-confident exterior suggested”
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Peter Wilby, The Guardian
“A sensitive and sympathetic biography … that takes Botham as a whole, and allows us to marvel at him a little once again … even-handed, beautifully written”
The Cricketer