Cricket legend Sir Ian Botham has revealed he was saved by his fellow great Merv Hughes when he took a painful fall into crocodile-infested waters in Australia’s wild tropical north last week.
‘Beefy’ Botham, 68, was on a four-day fishing trip with his former Ashes opponent when disaster almost struck as he tripped and took a tumble that left him with severe bruising – and put him at risk of an attack by a saltwater croc.
‘At the end of the day, Crocodile Beefy survived,’ the former all-rounder said, mixing his nickname with a reference to the hit Australian film Crocodile Dundee.
‘I was out of the water quicker than I went in.
‘Quite a few sets of [crocodile] eyes were having a peep at me. Luckily I had no time to think about what was in the water.’
The accident occurred as Botham and Hughes fished for barramundi on the Moyle River, about 200km south of Darwin.
Botham was moving from a smaller boat to another, larger vessel when his footwear got caught in a rope and he smashed into the boat before falling headfirst into the water.
There was also a family of bull sharks underneath the boat hoping for scraps from the fishermen, News Corp reported.
‘The guys were brilliant, it was just one of those accidents,’ Botham said.
‘It was all very quick and I’m OK now.’
Hughes, 62, has made a career out of his love of fishing since his playing career ended in 1994.
He stars in the popular TV show Merv Hughes Fishing, which sees him journey to far-flung locations like the area where he and Botham were casting their lines when disaster almost struck.
Botham’s love of fishing took hold when he was a child and he once said, ‘More than shooting or golf, fishing is my biggest passion.
‘There is something about rivers, the flow of water, watching on as the day goes by … I’ve never found a stretch of river that hasn’t somehow interested me.’
Australia is home to around 200,000 saltwater crocodiles and they are common in some areas of the Northern Territory, like the Moyle River, where there are approximately five of the reptiles per square kilometre.
The huge crocodilians are exceptionally dangerous but there are only one to two fatal attacks on humans per year in Australia.
They have killed 30 Australians in the last 25 years, according to crocattack.org, which keeps a database of attacks.
Saltwater crocs can live up to 70 years, growing up to 1000kg and six metres long.
Bull sharks are an aggressive species known for their ability to survive after swimming upriver from the ocean.
Last February a bull shark was blamed for a fatal attack on a 16-year-old girl in Perth’s Swan River.
While Botham and Hughes are mates, the Englishman still has a burning rivalry with another Aussie cricket great, Ian Chappell.
Last year the pair clashed once again in the TV sporting documentary The Longest Feud.
Chappell has long maintained Botham once threatened him with a beer glass at the Hilton Hotel in Melbourne back in 1977 after throwing him across a table – an accusation ‘Beefy’ says is ‘bulls***.’
When Chappell labelled Botham ‘a bully and a coward’ on camera, the level of animosity went up a notch in the astonishing exchange in which the former Aussie Test skipper branded his rival a ‘coward’ before ‘Beefy’ struck back by calling him ‘sad and lonely’.