Geoff Boycott: A Cricketing Hero

After his horrors against South Africa, Boycott resumed his alliance with Bob Barber, a partnership that was perhaps the brightest feature of England’s tour. Bristling with aggression, confident in his strokeplay, Barber was determined to take command from the start. To the delight of his England colleagues at Perth, the very first ball he received on the tour was smacked straight back over the head of the bowler, Graham MacKenzie, and reached the boundary on the first bounce. This was truly the ‘brighter cricket’ that the English authorities craved. Barber’s freedom to attack was enhanced by the knowledge that this was his final tour before giving up cricket for business. He was playing for enjoyment, not for his future.

After a draw at Brisbane – Boycott’s 63 not out guiding England to safety on the last afternoon – the second Test at Melbourne saw Boycott and Barber put on 98 for the first wicket in just 16 overs, with Boycott hitting another half-century after being dropped at slip in MacKenzie’s first over. In this high-scoring draw he also took his last two wickets in Test cricket, 2 for 32 in Australia’s second innings of 426. His second victim was stumped by Jim Parks, who recalls: ‘He wasn’t the worst bowler, open-chested, fired in his little inswingers. He was very accurate and we could use him to block up one end.’ Yet, after this tour, Boycott was only to send down another 25 in the remaining sixteen years of his Test career.

It was in the next Test at Sydney that the Boycott-Barber combination achieved their greatest triumph. In a glorious exhibition of batting, they put on 234 for the first wicket in just four hours, England’s highest stand for the first wicket in an Ashes Test since Hobbs and Sutcliffe’s 283 at Melbourne in the 1924/25 series. The partnership was almost over before it began. On 12, Boycott was dropped at short-leg off MacKenzie. After that, there was scarcely an error as Barber, backed by his young partner, took a scythe to the Australian attack: 93 were scored up to lunch; 141 in the next two hours. Then Boycott was caught and bowled by the leg-spinner Peter Philpott for 84. Fifty minutes later Barber was out for his breathtaking 185, still the highest score by an England batsman on the first day of a Test against Australia.

The Boycott-Barber stand laid the foundations of a big innings victory. M.J.K. Smith’s side, now one up with only two to play, dreamt of regaining the Ashes. But then things started to go wrong for both England and Boycott. In the next Test at Adelaide, Barber and Boycott failed badly in each of their two innings, as England slid to an innings defeat. In the final Test, Boycott’s form declined further. Yet instead of giving Barber the strike, he hogged the bowling to such an extent that he took 60 of the first 80 balls, scoring just 15 runs. Then to compound the sin, he called Barber for a ridiculous run after hitting the ball straight into Graham MacKenzie’s hands as he followed through. It was the last ball of the over and, as so often before, Boycott was trying to retain the strike. Twice Barber shouted, ‘No,’ but Boycott ignored him in his charge up the wicket. ‘I just walked off the field, didn’t bother to run at all. It was unfortunate. Geoffrey must have had some sort of mental block. I did tear into him a bit afterwards but he didn’t apologize. Maybe he was just too shy to speak like that. It was the only problem we ever had together.’

Boycott’s form continued to desert him as the MCC flew on to New Zealand for a three-match series. In the first two Tests, Boycott failed to reach double figures in any of his three innings and was dropped for the final match, the second time he had been left out of the England side in just eight months. As The Times put it, ‘The Yorkshire opening bat has looked stale and out of touch since leaving Australia.’

The 1966 season brought only a modest revival in fortunes. As usual, he topped the averages for Yorkshire, scoring 1097 runs at 39.17 and, nationally, he secured ninth place in the averages with 1854 runs at 39.44. He also scored six first-class centuries in the summer, including 164 against Sussex at Hove and, against Nottinghamshire at Sheffield, a century in each innings for the first time in his career.

But none of his hundreds were scored where it really counts, in the Test arena. England’s opponents in 1966 were the West Indies, then the unofficial world champions and at the peak of their powers. Led by probably the greatest all-rounder of all time, Gary Sobers, their bowling attack, built around Wes Hall, Charlie Griffith and Lance Gibbs, was just as formidable as a batting line-up of Conrad Hunte, Seymour Nurse, Basil Butcher and Rohan Kanhai. England were hardly in the same league. They lost the series 3-1, tried out three captains, and were plunged into one of those national moods of panic, which have always been a feature of our domestic game since the Victorian era.

Boycott fared little better than the rest of the England team, averaging only 26.57 in the series. His poor form at the start of the summer, combined with his run of failures at the end of the antipodean tour, ensured that he was left out of the side for the first Test at Old Trafford, where England’s massive defeat cost M.J.K. Smith the captaincy. Boycott returned at Lord’s to open with a new folk hero, the Falstaffian Colin Milburn, whose 94 on his debut had been the only highlight of England’s performance at Manchester. Yet a far more important and emotional comeback at Lord’s was that of thirty-nine-year-old Tom Graveney, out of the side since the Australian tour of 1962/63. Intriguingly, Graveney, despite his attacking style, had always been young Boycott’s hero. ‘I can’t tell you why,’ he said, in a BBC radio interview in 1987 with Cliff Morgan. ‘The great player of Yorkshire cricket was Len Hutton but as a kid my hero was Tom Graveney, played in Gloucester, two hundred miles away. Elegant, lovely player, aesthetic, front foot, back foot. Sometimes he didn’t play for England, they didn’t pick him, just like me.’

Boycott soon had the chance to bat with his hero, when they came together at the fall of Milburn’s wicket with a score of just eight. They put on 115, with Boycott making 60 and Graveney eventually falling just four short of his hundred. Graveney recalls: ‘I had never batted with him before and it was great that day, super. We talked a lot and had no problems at all running between the wickets. It may have been that I was the sort of senior man, an old fella coming back, but he never gave me any anxiety. It may also have been that I did most of the calling. But it was a really enjoyable partnership.’ Graveney admires Boycott’s cricket but is critical of the Stakhanovite image of toil he has built around himself: ‘He tries to paint himself as someone who always had to work very hard but we all worked at our games without making it a chore. I used to have a net every day. I was just giving myself the best chance to get a few runs whenever I went in. I loved batting just as much as he did.’

Apart from a brave 71 at Nottingham, Boycott failed in his other Test innings against the West Indies. This was a worrying period for him. He had failed to average 40 in his last two seasons with Yorkshire. After 24 matches, his Test average now stood at only 36.6, acceptable but hardly high-class. Moreover he had scored only two Test centuries, the last of them 15 matches ago. Of his problems Boycott explained, in a 1971 interview: ‘I came on the cricket scene very quickly in 1963. I did rather well and the publicity that surrounded me told everybody that I was going to be a great player. But I think what people forgot is that I came into cricket so quickly that I did not have the maturity and experience. All this caught up with me around 1966 and 1967 and I became very introspective and a little bit nervous.’

By the end of 1966, Boycott was in danger of becoming just another useful but inconsistent performer. But the next 12 months were to take him to a position of far greater public prominence – and not always for the right reasons.

8 ‘A Great Score, in Anyone’s Language’ (#ulink_e7485cfd-ca44-5910-b3c3-38be5c8c5b6a)

Today, given the intensity of international competition, it might seem ridiculous that an England cricketer could be dropped after hitting a double century in a Test match. But that is what happened to Geoffrey Boycott in June 1967, when he scored 246 not out in almost ten hours against India at Headingley, then was excluded from the next Test.

Boycott’s Headingley marathon was deemed to have contravened the new ethos of ‘brighter cricket’ and the selectors decided he had to be punished. What particularly aggrieved them was his batting on the first day. In a full six hours’ play, he had made only 106 runs, failing to accelerate even after tea. In the first hour, he hit just 17 runs, followed by eight in the second, 15 in the third, 23 in the fourth, and 21 and 22 in the last two hours. Moreover, he was playing on an excellent pitch against an appallingly weak Indian attack, which was barely of county standard to begin with and plunged below minor counties level in the afternoon, thanks to injuries to medium pacer Rusi Surti (bruised knee) and the left-arm spinner Bishen Bedi (torn muscle). Boycott’s inertia drove hundreds of his own Yorkshire spectators to leave the ground after tea although he was near his century, while even a sympathetic journalist like Ian Wooldridge wrote in the Daily Mail that his last three hours at the crease ‘could not be excused by his nearest and dearest relations’. Far from mitigating his crime, his freer approach the next day, when he added 140 runs in less than four hours, appeared to prove that he could score more quickly if he wanted to. For Boycott’s enemies, the Headingley innings revealed the very essence of the man, a selfish player focused entirely on his own performance rather than on the interests of the team or the entertainment of the public.

Yet the absurdity of Boycott’s suspension was that his double hundred, far from undermining England’s cause, had helped them win by six wickets well before tea on the last day. Test openers are supposed to lay the foundations of a big score – and that was exactly what Boycott had achieved. As the great off-spinner Lance Gibbs told Boycott after his suspension was announced: ‘If you had been a West Indian, you would have been a hero. No West Indian would ever get dropped for making a double century.’ In truth, the selectors’ decision was motivated more by public relations than by cricket. The media were baying for action against Boycott and the selectors felt they had to be seen to do something. But their gesture looked both panic-stricken and patronizing – in effect, the Indian tourists were being told that their Tests should be treated as little more than exhibition matches.

There were other powerful arguments in Boycott’s defence. He had been in poor form in the run-up to the Test, making only two scores of over 50 in his previous twelve first-class innings. On the first morning he displayed his lack of touch by continually playing and missing. Instead of throwing away his wicket, however, he battled through the crisis, hitting himself back into form by grinding out the runs. His more vigorous strokeplay on the second day was the result not of a whimsical change of mood but of the renewed confidence that came with a century. England’s captain Brian Close recognized the difficulties of Boycott’s position, writing later: ‘You had to admire the sheer guts of a man so palpably out of form yet so desperately trying to fight his way out of his bad spell.’ Close wanted to keep Boycott in the side but was outvoted four to one by the other selectors, Doug Insole, Peter May, Alec Bedser and Don Kenyon. ‘I said to them, “Look, I’ll give him a right bollocking and tell him not to let it happen again.” But the selectors replied that such was his selfishness that it could not be tolerated. So that was it,’ Close told me.

One of the central charges against Boycott was that he had ‘wilfully disobeyed his captain’s orders’. Boycott has always maintained that he never received direct instructions to speed up. His version appears to be backed by Close and, even more explicitly, by one of his batting partners, Basil D’Oliveira. Close’s recollection is that he merely said to Boycott at tea that he should see if he could open up, though he should not do anything foolish. Later he went on to the balcony to try to catch Boycott’s attention but he admits that Boycott was concentrating so hard that he probably did not see him. In his autobiography Time to Declare, D’Oliveira wrote that on the second morning, chairman of selectors Doug Insole came into the dressing room ‘to read the Riot Act’ and tell the batsmen to give the crowd something to enjoy. ‘When it was time to go out to the middle, Boycs led the way and our skipper, Brian Close, said to me just as I was leaving, “Tell Boycs to take no notice, just play his natural game.”’

For a sensitive cricketer, who always took immense pride in his professionalism, this rejection was a shattering blow. For the remaining twenty seasons of his first-class career, the selectors’ decision rankled with him, a stain on his reputation that could never be blotted out by all his many achievements. Just after his retirement, he told the BBC broadcaster Peter Jones: ‘It is a stigma I will always carry. Brian Clough says to me, “Try and forgive them but don’t ever forget.” Well, I won’t forget and I can’t forgive because I think it was an unnecessary thing to do.’ Some commentators, who refused to be caught up in the hysteria over ‘brighter cricket’, agreed. John Woodcock wrote in the Cricketer: ‘The credit he deserved was simply for pursuing the objective he set himself so successfully. In anyone’s language it was a great score and I expect that one day, in more taxing circumstances, England will be indebted to him for his obduracy.’

For Boycott, the verdict was as unjust as the one he received in a French court more than three decades later. But resilience in a crisis has always been one of his virtues. Publicly he put a brave face on his humiliation. Brian Close wrote later that he was a ‘model of restraint. For the next few days I never ceased to admire the control he displayed in what was obviously a very trying time for him.’

Nevertheless, the decision appeared to affect his batting for the rest of the summer. He only played in two more Tests, one against India and the other against Pakistan, failing to distinguish himself in any of his four innings. It was a throat infection that kept him out of the third Test against Pakistan, while a personal tragedy, the death of his father, required him to stand down from the first. Boycott heard the news while he was playing for Yorkshire against Surrey at the Oval. ‘They asked me to stay and bat, then go home for the funeral. I made 70-odd. It was strength of character,’ he later recalled.

Boycott’s decision to keep on playing should not be seen as callous. Throughout his life, he was at his most comfortable and secure when he was on the cricket field. In his moment of loss, this man of strong emotions found solace at the crease.

The feeling in Yorkshire that Boycott was a victim of the metro-politan, public-school cricket establishment’s prejudice was dramatically reinforced at the end of the summer by the sacking of Brian Close as England captain over allegations – strongly disputed – of unsporting behaviour in a match against Warwickshire at Edgbaston. Amongst those voting in the MCC committee was the skeletal figure of former Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home who, as Lord Dunglass in the 1930s, had been a passionate supporter of the appeasement of Adolf Hitler. That puts Close’s misdemeanours into perspective. At least Close had the consolation of helping Yorkshire to win the championship yet again, with some help from Boycott who, despite his England troubles, headed the Yorkshire averages (1260 runs at 48.46). Wisden wrote of his performance, in words that might sum up his whole batting career: ‘Only Boycott showed consistent authority throughout the programme. Without his special characteristics of ruthless resolve and concentration, batting consistency would have been hard to achieve.’

That spirit of resolve was to be in even greater evidence in the winter, as Boycott toured the West Indies for the first time and emerged triumphant against Hall, Sobers, Griffith and Gibbs. All his problems of the last two years were put behind him. For perhaps the first time in his career, he looked a genuinely world-class batsman, showing the full range of his strokes and seeking to dominate the bowling. His brilliant form brought him 1154 runs in just 11 first-class games, while in the Tests he scored 463, an average of 66.14. Colin Cowdrey, his captain on that trip – appointed in place of Close – says of Boycott’s progress: ‘By the time of that trip, he had made himself into a very good cricketer. He was much tighter, much less loose than the batsmen of today, and he was brilliant at working out what shots to eliminate in any given circumstance. I also admired his courage against the pace attack. Though he could sometimes go a bit haywire, I actually found him a pretty good judge of a run. I had absolutely no problems captaining him. He might have been reserved, but I found him very astute and shrewd with his advice. He was just a damn good player, great to have in the side.’

Boycott signalled his intentions for the series by hitting four boundaries in Wes Hall’s first two overs in the opening Test match at Port of Spain. He went on to score 68, one of the building blocks of a massive total of 568, which should have seen England to victory. At tea on the last afternoon, the West Indies, having followed on, were staring at defeat on 180 for 8. Then immediately after the interval Wes Hall, at number 10, gave a chance to Boycott at short leg. Unaccustomed to fielding in close, he put it down and Hall, partnered by Gary Sobers, saw the West Indies through to safety.

The second and third Tests both ended in draws as well. Then, in the fourth Test, Boycott played one of the most significant innings of his career. On the final day, the match was petering out to a draw when suddenly Gary Sobers made probably the strangest declaration in the history of Test cricket, setting England 215 runs to win in 165 minutes, a seriously achievable target. Apart from sheer frustration at yet another non-result, Sobers’ extraordinary action may have been prompted by the belief that England were vulnerable to spin. In the first innings their tail had collapsed to Basil Butcher, an occasional leg-break bowler, in a spell of 5 for 34; indeed, Butcher was so occasional that these were to be the only five wickets he took in a 44-match Test career. But, in England’s favour, the pitch was still good and Charlie Griffith was injured.

Boycott and Edrich made a solid start, putting on 55 in 19 overs. At tea, with only 140 needed in 90 minutes and nine wickets still standing, it seemed obvious to almost everyone in the England camp that Sobers had badly miscalculated, everyone that is, except the skipper Colin Cowdrey, who was inclined to caution. Tom Graveney explains: ‘In the dressing room, Colin wasn’t sure if we should keep going for the runs. Just before tea, Willie Rodriguez had bowled two or three really good overs at Kipper and he hadn’t got the runs he thought he should have.’ A heated discussion followed. Cowdrey was still not positive but it was the two arch-blockers, Boycott and Barrington, who were amongst the most vociferous in support of a continuing run-chase, Boycott arguing, ‘Sobers has given us a real chance. Now let’s go and have a bloody crack at it.’

Abandoning his reluctance, Cowdrey played brilliantly, taking the score from 73 to 173 in just 18 overs before he was out. Then Boycott took charge, judging the scoring rate precisely against the clock and hitting off the necessary runs with three minutes – the equivalent of eight balls – to spare. Yet, like his Gillette innings, there was a downside to this triumph, for once again critics were asking why he did not play in this aggressive style more often. Warwickshire fast bowler David Brown says: ‘That afternoon we saw a glimpse of what he could do. He played brilliantly and I thought, If you played like that all the time you’d be an absolute revelation.’ England just clung on for a draw in the final Test, with Boycott scoring his maiden century against the West Indies in England’s first innings, so Cowdrey’s team returned home victors by 1-0.

Boycott was now indisputably England’s first-choice opener. Despite this success, his awkwardness in company remained a source of exasperation to some of his colleagues. On one occasion he provoked an embarrassing row during a dinner organized in a private room at Trinidad’s Hilton Hotel by Vic Lewis, the former band leader, businessman and agent. There were about fourteen people present, including several of the leading England and West Indian players along with their wives and girlfriends. Vic Lewis as the host was at one end and Jill his wife was at the other. Half-way through the meal, there was a loud crash and a commotion. Jill suddenly stood up: ‘Vic, I have had to put up with some pretty nasty and preposterous people during your career in showbusiness. But I have never met a ruder person than this man here,’ she said, pointing to Boycott. She then stormed off and sat down at the other end of the table.

‘Well, she shouldn’t be bloody going on about creekit in such a stupid way,’ Boycott explained defensively.

One member of that MCC side, Basil D’Oliveira, whose gregariousness – the hangover appeared to be part of his tour baggage – could hardly have been more different from Boycott’s asceticism, later gave this analysis of Boycott the tourist, again highlighting his absolute devotion to cricket: ‘He is so wrapped up in his cricket and sometimes this can be misconstrued. You have to know his ways and you find these out over a long period. He never seems to relax. If he does relax, he’s sleeping. Cricket is his life and I don’t think he has any other interests to help him unwind.’

As a room-mate of Boycott’s on that tour, Pat Pocock gained a sharp insight into Boycott’s all-consuming passion for his game. Of that experience, he wrote in his wonderful autobiography Percy: The Perspicacious Memoirs of a Cricketing Man: ‘Rooming with Boycott is a very serious event in a cricketer’s life. You are quickly made to realize that you have come to this distant country on business. The thought of enjoyment should not enter your head, since it never entered his. He spoke only of cricket and Yorkshire, since the two things in his mind were synonymous. He spoke, and you listened as that quiet, flat-vowelled voice droned on into the night. It was the voice of a middle-aged man in his mid-twenties, the voice of a man who had never been young.’ Yet Pocock saw another, more generous side to Boycott’s character, as he explained to me: ‘In Barbados, where it was bloody hot, he would bat in the nets for more than fifty minutes. He would go on and on, often against the local bowlers. When he had finished, he came out, took his pads off and then individually thanked each bowler in turn, no matter where they were on the ground. He was brilliant at that. I remember one guy had gone right over to the other side of the field and Boycott followed him just to thank him. He was able to do that because it related to his batting.’

After his Caribbean triumph, there were high expectations of Boycott for the 1968 season. But Boycott’s summer turned into a damp squib. Plagued by a serious back injury, which caused him to miss half the season, Boycott performed disappointingly on his three Test appearances against Australia, averaging only 32 and failing to pass 50 in any innings in yet another drawn Ashes series. For Yorkshire, he was only able to play 10 matches in 1968, though he performed superbly in May and June before his back froze, scoring no less than five centuries in the county championship. Returning to competitive cricket at the end of the season, he confirmed his class once more by hitting 93 and 115 in a Scarborough Festival match for an England XI versus the Rest of the World.

It was during this Scarborough Festival that Boycott over-indulged in alcohol for one of the few times in his career. With Yorkshire having won the title yet again, champagne celebrations were soon under way during the Yorkshire-MCC fixture. To the surprise of his colleagues, Boycott was as keen to imbibe as the rest of them. Don Wilson says: ‘I can tell you the champagne was flowing. And Geoff had a few, very nearly fell into the rubbish tip at the rear of the bar.’ Fred Trueman’s memory was just as graphic: ‘It was the only time I have ever seen him drink. We were batting and we had just come off for bad light. And Geoff was sitting on the floor, with his pads on, his back against the wall, drinking champagne. There were a few MCC players in the dressing room laughing at him. He just said, “Yeah, you can laugh. But you’ll be out there all day tomorrow because I’m going to get a hundred.” And he did’ – 102 not out, in fact, despite the hangover.

1968 was to be a crucial turning-point for Yorkshire. Two of the great stalwarts of the glory years, Fred Trueman and Ray Illingworth – later to be key figures in the club’s battle with Boycott in the eighties – retired, the former because of advancing age, the latter because of the committee’s refusal to give him the security of a contract. Illingworth then joined Leicestershire in 1969. Yorkshire’s years of effortless superiority were drawing to a close. This was to be the last year in which the championship trophy went to Headingley and, in retrospect, those Scarborough celebrations held to mark yet another triumph should perhaps have been a wake.

9 ‘So That’s What You’ve Been Up To’ (#ulink_c406043f-927d-5eba-8e94-7f5739ff6d70)

Boycott once famously said: ‘Given the choice between Raquel Welch and a hundred at Lord’s, I’d take the hundred every time.’ He also told Professor Anthony Clare during his interview for In the Psychiatrist’s Chair. ‘My mother used to warn me: “Stay away from the girls, Geoffrey, they get you in the woods, they get you into trouble.” Always follow your mum’s advice.’ This was little more than a rhetorical smokescreen to disguise his fondness for women but, outside the cricket world, such comments have led to occasional speculation that Geoffrey Boycott might be gay. After all, to pseudo Freudians his lifestyle had many of the features of the homosexual stereotype: resolutely unmarried; an intense relationship with his mother; a streak of vanity about his appearance; a penchant for creating drama around him; fastidiousness about his diet, clothes and personal hygiene; a degree of sensitivity combined with emotional insecurity; a preference for Cinzano over beer; and a love of performing for the crowd.

In the wake of revelations about Boycott’s personal life arising from the French court case, such an idea has proved absurdly wide of the mark. In fact, an alternative image has been created, that of Boycott as the voracious womanizer who accumulates his sexual conquests just as eagerly as he used to pile up the runs. His friend Ted Lester, the scorer for Yorkshire throughout Boycott’s career, told me: ‘He has had a good run as far as women go. I’ve seen him with a lot of crumpet you’d be delighted to go with. There have been a lot of women in his life, but I will say this, he’s always got rid of them by eleven o’clock so he could get his eight hours’ sleep.’

Many others have testified that, throughout his playing days, he was not the Puritan that the public once thought. David Gower, fellow commentator and Test cricketer, says: ‘On tour he was never gregarious with the team but every now and then you might catch him in the hotel corridor furtively ushering some brunette into his room and you think, Ah, so that’s what you’ve been up to.’ Peter Willey, an England tourist of the Gower era, backs this up: ‘I knew all about his women. That’s why he often stayed on a separate floor in the team hotel, so he could get people in and out when he wanted to. Everywhere he went he was with different women. He could be very charming with them but he was always secretive about that side of his life, never brazen.’

Sometimes his liking for female company would impinge on other players. One of the England tourists on the 1970/71 tour to Australia told me of this comical incident. ‘In Melbourne, I was sharing a room with another player, and Boycs, who was sharing with John Hampshire, overheard that we would be away for the weekend on separate trips. But my visit fell through at the last minute, so I returned to the Windsor hotel in the mid-afternoon. I went up to the porter to ask for my key but was told it had gone so I had to go up to the room to check what was happening. When I got there the door was locked but I could hear whispering inside. I knocked a few times and there was no answer, though the whispering became louder. Eventually I said to whoever was in there, “Listen, if you won’t let me in, I’ve got two choices. Either I kick the door down or I call the manager to get a spare key.” At this moment the sheepish figure of Boycs opened the door, wearing only a towel, while I could see a woman scurrying around in the background.

‘“I thought thee were away for t’ weekend,” he said.

‘“What’s that got to do with you? Why couldn’t you stay in your own room?”

‘“Cos Hamps is there. Listen, thee won’t say owt about this, will thee?”’

At first glance, it might seem strange that Boycott should be so successful with women. When it comes to looks, he is hardly Brad Pitt. Pale, balding, of average height (5 foot 10) and bespectacled for much of his career, he could never have competed with the glamour boys of British sport, like George Best or James Hunt. As fellow players have testified, his single-mindedness about cricket could make his conversation somewhat limited. Nor could he have ever been described as the most romantic of souls. In an interview with the London Evening Standard in June 1999, when asked what Anne Wyatt and Rachael Swinglehurst (the mother of his daughter Emma and, since 2003, his wife) had given him in their long relationships, he replied, ‘I don’t know.’ Then asked if he knew what they loved about him, he continued, ‘It’s no use guessing what other people bloody think. I just give them what I am. There are no hidden agendas. I’m open and frank. If they misunderstand my intentions, they can’t be listening.’ And finally, in response to the question as to whether he had ever been in love, he said, ‘I don’t know.’

One accusation sometimes made against Boycott is that he can behave like a male chauvinist. Simon Hughes, the Channel Four analyst who has worked for many years with Boycott, told me: ‘In the commentary box if there are women around he’ll definitely make a comment about their appearance, like “Nice tits.” To use the word lech is perhaps unfair, but he certainly has an eye for the ladies, of any age.’ One television producer who, given the vituperative nature of his comments, understandably wished to remain anonymous, says: ‘His attitude towards the production staff can be terrible and his treatment of some of the women is appalling, with offensive and sexist comments about their physique. You often hear him with a woman, talking about her appearance to her face. There is a serious cringe factor with him.’

It is interesting to note that it is often men, particularly in the politically aware media, who appear shocked by Boycott’s attitudes. And while many of today’s women might also be outraged by his robust expressions of his masculinity, others take far less offence or are even flattered. Rachael Swinglehurst, whom he first met in 1974, said in an interview with the Daily Mail in December 1998: ‘In a relationship he wants to be the man and he likes his women to be feminine. He’s a boobs and bottom chap and he makes you feel terrific. He’s got a lovely body, which has made me look after mine.’

While some of Boycott’s utterances might be deeply inappropriate for the modern workplace, there can also be something patronizing about certain men jumping to condemn Boycott on behalf of supposedly aggrieved women. A classic example of this was an incident that took place on the 1992 England tour to New Zealand, where Boycott worked as both a commentator and batting coach. During one match, when he was giving a voice test to the TVNZ production staff, he told attractive TV sound operator Mary Graham, ‘I’d rather spend a week than a day with you,’ and also how much he liked her legs. Meant as a compliment, the remarks were noted by a male colleague in the TVNZ daily log, with some criticisms attached. Immediately, the station’s equal-opportunities procedures swung into action. Boycott found himself at the centre of an inquiry into allegations of sexual harassment and had to defend himself in the press against charges of being a ‘sex pest’. But as the station’s inquiry soon found, Boycott had no case to answer. Crucially, Mary Graham had taken no offence at anything he had said and was surprised at the fuss. Boycott was immediately cleared. TVNZ’s director of sport John Knowles reported that the allegations of harassment were ‘totally and absolutely groundless. The vital party – the woman herself – has absolutely no complaint about Geoff’s conduct.’