Читать книгу Geoff Boycott: A Cricketing Hero - Leo McKinstry - Страница 10

An excellent start to the 1962 season in the Second XI led to Boycott’s call-up to the first team. In the opening match, he scored another century against Cumberland, 126 not out, which led to the award of his second team cap. Innings of 32 and 87 not out followed against Northumberland, then a century against Lancashire’s Second XI, in what was known as the Rosebuds match. Peter Lever, one of the Lancashire bowlers then, recalls that his colleagues, like so many others, thought far more of John Hampshire than Boycott at this time. ‘At Old Trafford in the second team, we used to look for Hampshire’s name at number four, that’s who we were bothered about. Boycott wasn’t nearly so talented. You could bowl half volleys at Boycott all day and he would never try and score off them.’

Whatever the junior Lancashire dressing room thought, Boycott’s rich vein of early form had made inevitable his promotion to the first team. The greatest English first-class batting career of modern times began on 16 June 1962 against the Pakistani tourists at Bradford, when Boycott went out to open for Yorkshire with Brian Bolus. Astonishingly, he hit the first ball he received for four, a feat he was not to repeat many times in his subsequent 24 seasons as a professional. Soon afterwards, however, he was bowled without adding to his score by the medium pace of D’Souza. In the second innings of the drawn game, he also failed, again dismissed by D’Souza for four.

Despite his poor start against Pakistan, Boycott was selected for the next Yorkshire game, at Northampton, thereby making his first appearance in the County Championship. Dropping down the order to number four, he was dismissed for just six in the first innings, though in the second he battled to 21 not out amidst a dismal Yorkshire collapse, which allowed Northants to win by six wickets. He did even better in the following drawn match against Derbyshire, scoring 47 and 30 as an opener. It was a useful but hardly dazzling beginning, and Boycott now returned to the second team for the rest of the summer, apart from two appearances against Essex and Kent. Against the latter, he hit 18 in the first innings and recorded his first duck for Yorkshire in the second, though he also displayed early signs of that showy confidence, which was a mask for his insecurity. The Kent player Brian Luckhurst, later to be one of Boycott’s most successful Test opening partners, recalls that the Kent seam bowler David Halfyard bowled a short ball to Boycott who pulled it straight over square leg for six. ‘At the end of the over, Colin Cowdrey, being the lovely man he is, went up to Boycs, whom he had obviously never met before, and said, “Good shot, Geoffrey.” To which Boycs replied, in his broadest accent, “Ay, and if he pitches there again next over, I’ll bloody hit him there again.”’

For all such bravado, by the end of the 1962 season, his average stood at just 21.42 from 150 runs scored in nine innings, while his performances in the colts showed a worrying decline. Many doubted, at this stage, that Boycott was cut out for top-level cricket. With typical candour, he admitted, in a later BBC interview, that most of his first appearances for the county had been inadequate. ‘I don’t think it took me long to realize all the weaknesses I had. They just rolled my wicket over and said it was like shelling peas.’

A host of young players, of course, go through similar experiences. But Boycott’s early problems at Yorkshire might have been exacerbated by the unique pressures of the club, stemming from both its pre-eminent position in English cricket – they won the County Championship yet again in 1962 – and the huge expectations of the Yorkshire public, which has long possessed the most knowledgeable and unforgiving spectators in the world. On the positive side, these twin forces helped to create a ruthless professional outlook. Chris Balderstone, now a top umpire, who played with Boycott for ten years at Yorkshire, says: ‘Most of us young lads would have given our right arms to play for Yorkshire. It was every man for himself. You had to be mentally tough to cope, getting your head down and really grafting the whole time.’ But, more negatively, this mood also resulted in a profound spirit of caution. With so many players to choose from in the Yorkshire leagues and such high demands from the crowd, youngsters rarely enjoyed any permanence in the team. A couple of failures and they could be out, replaced by yet another bright prospect. So everything was done to eliminate risks rather than exhibit strokes. Brian Bolus was a classic case of what could go wrong. Hovering on the fringes of the Yorkshire team for six years from 1956, Bolus left in 1962, moved to Nottinghamshire and, freed from his Yorkshire shackles, quickly displayed such a spirit of adventure that within a couple of months he was opening for England.

Perhaps even more importantly, many newcomers to the Yorkshire team found the atmosphere intimidating. Yorkshire in the fifties has been described as ‘a hard, vicious school’, and a legacy of this mood still lingered in the early sixties. Former Yorkshire leg-spinner Peter Kippax recalls: ‘I played in Boycott’s first game for Yorkshire in 1962. It was a tough side, then; they were real pros. Let’s be honest, they were not a welcoming bunch. They were all looking after their places and they did not want any upstarts getting a lead in. I thought the atmosphere was awful. Once, when I was playing one of my first games, I arrived early, put my things on a peg and the next thing I knew, they were right across the table. I had used the spot of someone who had changed there for ten years.’

For some outsiders, Boycott’s obstreperous and egocentric nature only reflected this negative Yorkshire mentality. The Warwickshire fast bowler David Brown thinks that Boycott’s attitude was typical of the county: ‘The Yorkshiremen have always rucked among themselves. When I first played, they were constantly moaning at each other. You could listen to their dressing room and it was a guinea a minute. Boycott might have thought too much about himself but in many respects he was just like the rest of them.’

But for those within the Yorkshire set-up, Boycott’s attitude was a particular cause of friction within the club. His fellow colt Peter Kippax says: ‘He never got close to anyone; he was definitely not a team man. He made no contribution to the dressing room other than to draw practical jokes towards himself. He was there in the corner and you either left him alone or you took the mickey out of him.’ One of the central difficulties was his continued poor running between the wickets. The great Australian all-rounder Keith Miller once said of Boycott: ‘He’s got every other aspect of his game so organized that I cannot understand why he does not master the elementary rules of running.’ Two incidents in the 1962 season added to this sorry reputation. In Boycott’s debut championship game in Northants, he managed to run out Phil Sharpe by declining a perfectly safe run. In the game against Derbyshire, he and Ken Taylor had put on 67 in their opening partnership when Taylor hit the ball to the leg-side, started to run, then Boycott sent him back and he was out by a considerable distance. As a result of these two disasters, Boycott received a severe lecture from his captain Vic Wilson. Boycott, with characteristic impenitence, refused to give ground or apologize, thereby worsening his standing in the team. As Don Wilson later wrote: ‘These incidents were guaranteed to rub colleagues up the wrong way but his conduct afterwards was something less than remorseful. We thought at the time he was just a boy who didn’t know any better, but he even makes light of it now. It was never because he was an inveterate bad runner or caller; it was because he was inherently selfish.’

The accusation of selfishness was applied not just to his running but to his whole approach to cricket. There were mutterings that he would not bat in the interest of the side, that his slow rate of scoring reflected his obsession with his average. His sense of isolation was compounded by his anguish at failure, which meant that he retreated further into himself at any early dismissal. As he was later to admit: ‘I became very tense and taut and for a long time I used to find it very difficult to discuss getting out with anybody. I used to go very quiet, into my shell. Basically, it was because I felt shame at getting out.’

The strength of Boycott’s ambition further reinforced his distance from his team-mates, since he placed professional success above popularity. ‘He was determination personified. He practised harder than anyone else, went to bed earlier, did not socialize with the rest of us. He did not have great natural ability, but overcame that problem through sheer grit, for which you have got to admire the man,’ says Peter Kippax.

Animosity over Boycott’s reluctance to mix socially with his colleagues focused on his dislike of going out drinking. Alcohol has always been an essential part of the cricket scene, with the teetotaller as rare as a long hop from Glenn McGrath. The acceptance of that first pint from the gnarled old pro is almost a rite of passage for a young player, and most newcomers feel that they have to prove they can hold their drink as well as their catches. ‘I was a very rare bird in cricket when I started,’ Boycott said later. ‘A young man who didn’t smoke and didn’t drink, who was shy and introverted and found it difficult to talk to people, who was mad keen on physical fitness.’ The problem was worsened by the fact that Yorkshire in the sixties, for all their internal squabbles, were a very social side. Don Wilson explained to me: ‘Wherever we went on the county circuit, we entertained; I was the singer and Phil Sharpe played the piano. Now this did not suit Geoffrey in any way whatsoever. But I never said there was anything wrong with him just because he didn’t drink. Everyone seems to think because I enjoyed a drink -Trueman, Jimmy Binks, Doug Padgett and Nic, all of us enjoyed pints in the evening – and Geoff didn’t, there was a problem. It wasn’t that. If he’d have come along out with us and just had a glass of orange, then no one would have minded.’

This claim is open to doubt. In fact there are two recorded incidents of Boycott being humiliated for his early teetotalism. When he had just won his Second XI cap Brian Sellers, the autocratic Yorkshire cricket chairman, having offered to buy a round in a local pub, exploded when Boycott requested an orange juice. ‘You can buy your own bloody orange juice,’ said Sellers. The other happened at the Balmoral in Scarborough when, amidst a round awash with alcohol, Boycott asked for an orange squash. The landlord brought over a glass ostentatiously decorated with fruit on cocktail sticks. It was a gesture, Boycott felt, purposely designed to make him ashamed. ‘The lads thought I wasn’t a man because I drank only orange squash,’ he said. No wonder he had little time for hanging around bars after that. He believed he had made an effort to socialize, and the response had been crushing.

Given both his modest performances on the field in 1962 and his awkwardness with his team-mates, it is not surprising that his captain Vic Wilson felt that he should not be retained by Yorkshire at the end of the season. Wilson wrote to this effect to the committee, arguing that Boycott was neither a good enough player with whom to persevere nor the sort of person that Yorkshire should have in their squad. The chances of an uncapped Boycott surviving might have looked slim, especially when he was up against his rival John Hampshire. And there was a long-established stream of Yorkshire-born players leaving the club after failing to make the grade as a junior. Of Boycott’s own contemporaries, Duncan Fearnley (Worcestershire), Jack Birkenshaw (Leicestershire), Mike Smedley (Nottinghamshire), Dickie Bird (Leicestershire) and Rodney Cass (Essex) were all forced to seek their fortunes elsewhere because of limited opportunities in their native county.

But, as so often with Boycott in a career of interwoven triumphs and disasters, he now had a stroke of good fortune. Vic Wilson announced his retirement in 1962 and Brian Close was appointed his successor. Close had a much more favourable view of Boycott. He told me: ‘When they made me captain after Vic left, I said to the committee, “Right, keep him and let me sort him out.” You see I realized that he had the ability to concentrate which you do not often find amongst young players. And he was so intent on improving. He spent all day long thinking about his game.’

Thinking about his game was exactly what Boycott did during the winter. Practising at the Johnny Lawrence school, he worked diligently on the deficiencies of his technique which had been so ruthlessly exploited by opposition bowlers, particularly a frailty outside the off-stump. The following summer, 1963, Boycott was a man transformed. After a hesitant start, he cemented his place with a wonderful innings against Lancashire in the Roses match at Bramall Lane, Sheffield. His 145, scored on a difficult pitch against top-class bowling, was not only his first century for Yorkshire but also a performance of such quality that the great cricket writer A. A. Thomson recorded: ‘Bramall Lane spectators, a craggy lot not easy to please, were unanimous in asserting that apart from half a dozen artistic masterpieces from Sir Leonard Hutton, this was the finest innings played by a Yorkshire batsman since the war.’ What made Boycott’s innings all the more admirable was that it took place when Yorkshire were in deep trouble against a Lancashire attack consisting of four future or present England bowlers: pacemen Brian Statham, Ken Higgs and Peter Lever, and the leg-spinner Tommy Greenhough, with 380 Test wickets between them over their careers. As Boycott walked to the wicket to join Bryan Stott, the scoreboard read 56 for 3. But the 22-year-old was undaunted. He was nursed through his early overs by Stott; then, once he was established, he broke loose and outscored the senior player with a series of flashing drives and cuts. He and Stott eventually put on 249 together and Yorkshire won the game by 10 wickets. As so often, Boycott took some of the gloss off his triumph with a tactless remark. ‘I got more than you,’ was the first thing he told his senior partner back in the dressing room. Stott was appalled, feeling the comment was stupid and childish. But, then, he was a successful businessman with his own electrical firm and a comfortable living. Cricket was a pleasure for him, whereas for Boycott it was an endless struggle – not just for his livelihood but also for self-justification.

This maiden century was followed by a string of good scores in June: 76 against Somerset, 49 not out against Gloucestershire, 50 against Warwickshire and, against Sussex in the Gillette Cup in front of a crowd of 15,000 at Hove, 71. This brilliant innings – in a losing cause – showed how far Boycott had developed as a stroke-player. Jim Parks, the Sussex and England wicket-keeper, recalls: ‘We had a good attack but Boycs was magnificent, played all the shots and had we not run him out I’m sure he would have gone on to win the match for Yorkshire. It was my first sight of him and he looked such a fine player that day.’

Boycott’s excellent run of form convinced him, in July 1963, to hand in his notice at the Ministry of Pensions in Barnsley and become a full-time cricketer. As he told his fellow civil servants, he was apprehensive about giving up a secure job in exchange for a precarious living as a sportsman. But it is wrong to exaggerate the risks he took. It was hardly as if the Barnsley branch of the Ministry of Pensions was the only occupation open to him. With his obvious intelligence and drive Boycott could have taken many other jobs if he had failed at Yorkshire. At the end of the 1963 season, for instance, Boycott quickly found a clerical position with the Yorkshire Electricity Board. This was, after all, the era of full employment – in July 1963, the number of registered unemployed stood at 494,000, a figure that any government today can only dream of. Furthermore, as soon as Yorkshire heard that he had left his job, he was offered a guaranteed payment – not a contract, Yorkshire never gave those until 1971 – of £16 a week in summer and £8 in winter, giving him some measure of security.

Yet the very fact that he had now to earn his living from the game reinforced his single-mindedness. Failure became even more unthinkable, dedication to his craft even more vital. Echoing in his head were the words of his former headmaster, Russell Hamilton, who had told him when Boycott sought his advice on becoming a full-time cricketer: ‘You should have learnt enough at school to know that if you want to go in for professional cricket, you have jolly well got to work at it, for it is a career.’ Never was a school-master’s warning more diligently heeded.

But his new status as a professional coincided with a brief dip in his form, as he was shuffled up and down the batting order. Throughout much of his time with Hemsworth Grammar, Ackworth, Barnsley, Leeds and the Yorkshire Second XI, Boycott had been an opening batsman, and in his first match against Pakistan in 1962 he had opened with Brian Bolus. His great recent success, however, had been achieved in the middle order. Now, in July, when he was asked by skipper Brian Close to open once more, he became anxious. Poor scores against Sussex and Surrey only seemed to confirm his doubts about the opening role, but his captain was unsupportive. Close says: ‘I asked him to open against Surrey at Bramall Lane and Geoff Arnold bowled him out for a duck. He came in and completely sulked. I gave him a right rollicking about it. I said, “Look, I’ve taken the decision to make you into an opening batsman because your particular temperament and approach fits it. Now, you go out and do your bloody best and try.” He was so sorry for his bloody self that he started to cry. But I made him realize that he had a job to do. I said to him, “Sympathy won’t get you anywhere.”’

Close was soon vindicated. Boycott, opening the innings against Warwickshire, scored 62 and 28, then scored his second century of the season, 113, in the Roses match at Old Trafford, batting for five hours without giving a chance – a rare double against the old enemy Lancashire. Then, at Sheffield for Yorkshire versus the West Indians he scored a brave 71 against the full might of the Caribbean attack, Wes Hall, Charlie Griffith and Gary Sobers. Even better followed in his first match at Lord’s, when Yorkshire played Middlesex. Boycott’s remarkable innings of 90 was made out of a Yorkshire total of just 144 against a new-ball attack, which included internationals Alan Moss and John Price. Boycott was bitterly disappointed not to have reached a century and, as usual, went into a sulk. But his astonishingly mature innings prompted that most perceptive of sports writers, Ian Wooldridge of the Daily Mail, to prophesy that he would soon become ‘a permanent opening batsman for England’.

Boycott rounded off this brilliantly successful first full season with the highest score of his career thus far, 165 against Leicestershire at Scarborough. He topped the Yorkshire averages – as he was subsequently to do in every single season until 1978 – with 1446 runs at 46.64, while he also finished second in the overall national batting averages. The conquering hero was wreathed in laurels. Yorkshire awarded him his cap. The Cricket Writers Club named him ‘Young Cricketer of the Year’, as did the Wombwell Cricket Society. Wisden said he was ‘easily the most successful batsman in Yorkshire and created a big impression with his reliability’. Former England all-rounder Trevor Bailey, still captain of Essex, was another to be impressed by Boycott. In Playfair Cricket Monthly he wrote this judicious analysis: ‘Geoff is clearly a dedicated cricketer, prepared to make any sacrifice that will help him succeed in his chosen profession. He has certainly remembered the advice of the old Yorkshire coach who used to say to his pupils, “Get your head over the ball and smell it.” I am sure that with his concentration and singleness of purpose, he will make many runs in the years that lie ahead.’