Simon Wilde is Geoff Boycott’s No. 2 fan – you can guess who’s No. 1
This is going to be hard to justify, I know. Press-box colleagues will now look the other way when they see me coming; certain former players will shake their heads reprovingly. “Doesn’t he know what Boycott was like?” they’ll be saying to themselves. “How blind he must have been . . .”
Well, yes, I do know what Boycott was like. Now. He had a reputation for thinking first of No. 1. But he was not alone in that. Cricket has seen many selfish players; some were just canny at hiding it. But back in the early 1970s, when I was growing up in Leeds, Boycott was a god. It is no use pretending otherwise. I was not alone in worshipping him. We all did – at least those of us who were not privy to the murderous undercurrents ripping through the Yorkshire dressing room as a once great club slid into mediocrity.
In truth the Yorkshire dressing room had never been a nice place – always hostile to newcomers and anyone who did not conform with the hard-nosed ethos that had won countless Championships. University graduates were viewed as mentally overdressed for the simple task of winning matches by Grinding The Bastards Down. Boycott, not a university man but, almost as bad, a teetotaller, was regarded as a freak. He found himself isolated long before he had worked out he was head and shoulders above the rest as a batsman.
All that counted
was the scorecard
in the paper
Worshippers like me were part of the problem. The Yorkshire public had very high sporting standards. Most had grown up with the county routinely challenging for the Championship. Leeds United were among the best football teams in Europe. But in cricket things were changing fast. In an attempt to enliven county games it was made easier to sign overseas players. At a stroke this transformed the landscape.
With typical arrogance Yorkshire thought they could get along without foreigners – they were still selecting only players born in the county – and they soon became a marginal force. In 1973 they even lost to Durham’s amateurs. There were a few fine players – John Hampshire and Chris Old – but overall they were a grey team playing grey cricket in a small-minded cause.
That is except for Boycott. There could be no disputing his technical excellence. He could lay claim to being the best batsman in the world and was not only Yorkshire’s mainstay but England’s; his batting in Australia in 1970–71 had been central to winning back the Ashes. This was the sort of sporting excellence we Yorkies were used to.
OK, so we did not know much about his reputation for awkwardness with team-mates. But when you are just entering your teens, it does not matter. All that counted was the scorecard in the paper . . . and there was Boycott, every day it seemed, top-scoring in another abject team performance. Amid such mediocrity the heroism seemed all the greater.
I was not alone. Hundreds in the county came to worship Boycott ahead of the team and, as has been seen with Brian Lara in the West Indies, the cult of personality usually leads to trouble. So, when Yorkshire removed Boycott as captain and later tried to remove him as player, public revolts were inevitable. Many felt that, whatever the problems, they simply could not be Boycott’s fault. Briefly, and damagingly, his supporters took over the club and won him three more years as a player.
“I don’t know why I’m shaking
your hand, son, you never write
anything nice about me.”
Already Boycott’s withdrawal from Test cricket between 1974 and 1977 had stretched my loyalty almost to breaking point. But, if it was stressful for me, it was not all plain sailing for him either. I see parallels between the problems he experienced as one of the first sports stars of the television age and those of George Best, also born in the 1940s. Although their reactions to dilemmas were different, they were both self-absorbed and confused young men, untrained to cope with a fierce public spotlight. Neither they, nor society, seemed to know how to handle the relationship.
For someone so easily painted black or white, Boycott’s behaviour was rarely predictable. He was accused of opting out of Test cricket for his own ends but then showed loyalty to his country during the Packer affair and as a member of Mike Brearley’s winning side became a revered and much more relaxed figure.
It was around this time that we first met. It was at an auction of sporting memorabilia in London, sent there for Wisden Cricket Monthly. The editor David Frith introduced me to Boycott, who shook my hand and said: “I don’t know why I’m shaking your hand, son, because you never write anything nice about me.” This was unwarranted; I had never written a hostile word about him.
But over time he redeemed himself. Around the press box he has always been happy to engage in cricket talk. The ultra-professionalism once applied to his batting is now applied to commentary. His illness, of course, mellowed him.
One encounter I will always remember. It was during the Centurion Test in January 2005, when on the back of Matthew Hoggard’s match-winning effort at the Wanderers I had been asked to compile a list of the 10 greatest Yorkshire cricketers to play for England.
I spoke about it to Boycott and Darren Gough, both in my 10. While Gough was desperate to know where I had placed him – and was most upset to learn he was No. 8, below Ray Illingworth – Boycott did not once try to lobby himself up from No. 4, below Len Hutton, Fred Trueman and Herbert Sutcliffe. How is that for unselfish?
SIMON WILDE is cricket correspondent of the Sunday Times and the author of a number of books on cricket