Arise Sir Ian..

Juxtaposition (placing or being placed close together)

I love the juxtaposition of the announcement of Ian Terence Botham's knighthood on the same day as Gary Neville, Michael Carrick, Stevie G and John Terry get married, the latter proving once again that money doesn't buy you class it simply enables you to look a complete wanker on a bigger scale than the rest of us.

Ian Botham did something in 1981 that few sportsmen or women ever achieve, he made a nation feel good about itself. You didn't have to be a cricket fan that summer to get caught up in the excitement of the Headingley test, the fact that England were being quoted as 500-1 to win when Botham came to the crease should tell you all you need to know about the position the England team found themselves in against a rampant Australia.

You can view sport in many ways, as theatre, as entertainment or simply as a physical and mental competition between an individual or group if individuals. The achievements of Botham with the bat (supported by Graham Dilley in his finest hour) and Bob Willis with the bat transcended mere sport - they elevated a game out of the long room into the living room, it was something that everybody was talking about.

To talk about his cricketting exploits only would be to give short shrift to the man behind the legend. A man who one day happened to walk into a children's ward in a hospital and who was told, in no uncertain manner, about the chances of survival of the children he saw. Botham's reaction wasn't to gather a few mates round to his place and play a game of cricket it was to walk from John O'Groats to Lands End, not once but many times - all but the first time without the presence of a television crew. He crossed the Alps on foot and he raised £10 million for the charity of his choice.

Sometimes when he talks about cricket on Sky you want to hide your face behind a cushion because he sounds so out of touch but you know that he means it from the heart, the same way he played the game and the same way he walked all those thousands of miles to raise money for children he would never meet and to whom his name probably meant nothing.

There can be few people this morning who didn't smile when they heard the news and whose minds were cast back to the summer of 1981 and an afternoon when Ian Botham decided he wasn't going to accept defeat and he would slog his out of trouble. As he once said himself, he didn't mind his batting being described as a slog but he would have liked somebody to prefix the word with 'magnificent'.