Friendly rivalry: what's that all about?

Sport, as audiences, players and especially football referees know, can bring out both the best and worst in us. Yet competition is what makes a contest, and a fair, hard-fought match is especially thrilling when an established rivalry adds backstory. Like ancient family vendettas, these rivalries can exist for years without either party ever knowing what originally caused the rift. The blood feuds between countries and clubs are well known, as well as those bitter personal battles that can escalate into violence - see Javed Miandad and Dennis Lillee for details. But what complications arise when the batsman or bowler is your team-mate, or best friend?

Though born and bred in Leicestershire, and being lucky enough to follow the Foxes in the 1980s, when they had David Gower and were capable of winning more than once every two years, the Somerset fixtures at Grace Road left me conflicted. I was usually willing on two of the visiting players - Viv Richards and Ian Botham - to succeed. They were my favourite cricketers of the era and I always wanted them to score runs and take wickets, and if neither performed and Leicestershire won (which did actually happen quite regularly, once upon a time), I went home disappointed.

This conflict of wanting the opposition to do well but ultimately for your own team to win must have been something experienced by those two Somerset players in particular.

"He showed me what a pint of bitter was," recollects Viv on the first time he met Botham. "And it just went from there." Two young men meeting each other when they were both on the verge of greatness, formed a bond that went beyond simple friendship. "In fact, he's not really a best friend," said Botham on Richards' 60th birthday in 2012. "He's more like a brother to me."

So when West Indies played England how did the two face up to each other? Respect by playing hard seems to be the answer.

Botham says he had "fierce" on-field battles with Richards, but "off the field there was no edge at all". Richards too, unsurprisingly, has nothing save compliments when playing against Botham in the national side. "You felt that England could achieve anything with Ian, even when we were winning all those games." In fact, Viv rated his brother Botham so highly that he'd be singled out in team talks. "We took time in our meetings to make sure he couldn't get away. We knew how destructive he could be."

It's this intel on close comrades, the players we've watched at the crease or run in to bowl for years, as well as face in the nets all through the winter, that adds another dimension to an on-field "friendly rivalry". We know their shots, which length will be dispatched and which line will cause problems. Facing ball after ball from a bowler, we become tuned to the slightest hand adjustment or action change, and that offcutter or bouncer becomes a telegraphed delivery rather than a surprise.

At the Oval in 2005, when Kevin Pietersen fetched a Shane Warne length ball from outside off stump and put him high into the stands, it was a shot born from total familiarity with the legspinner's armoury. Warne had captained Pietersen at Hampshire, where the two had netted together for hours, vital time for KP to forensically examine Warne's grip and body language, as well as to build a relationship that would nullify Warne's infamous sledging skills. "I never had the intimidation factor that everyone else did," wrote KP in Kevin Pietersen on Cricket. "I would just laugh at him and that would help me a lot."

In village cricket the status of the relationship is probably more important than our technical deficiencies. As a teenage cricketer I occasionally bowled at my senior team-mates who played for other club sides, and here it was wanting to impress my role models (as the desire to do well against them) that spurred me on - and them, unfortunately, as our own players always seemed to score runs when playing against us. These matches could produce cutting on-field vitriol, with old friends telling each other to "F*** off" before, usually, that Botham-Richards-type brotherhood was resumed with a pint after the game.

Not that friendly rivalries only exist between members of teams facing off. All summer you cheer on your team-mates - of course you do, being the team player you are, and never squirming and silently cursing as the batsman who walks to the crease after you've walked straight back in scores an effortless ton, or the first-change bowler takes a hat-full of cheap scalps with long hops and full tosses after your brilliant wicketless spell - and after the brief autumn respite you're back at the crease in the nets, competing against your very own brethren.

In fact, there's enough in-team rivalry when playing for the same XI, let alone facing mates on opposing sides, that I've decided I'd rather sit in the pub and buy my friend a pint than bowl him out, or worse still, watch him hit me for six.