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Geoff Boycott: A Cricketing Hero. Leo McKinstry
Читать онлайн.Название Geoff Boycott: A Cricketing Hero
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007375448
Автор произведения Leo McKinstry
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство HarperCollins
As we have seen, Boycott’s devotion to practice was almost fetishistic, playing in every game, every net session he could possibly manage. No match was too obscure for him, no distance too long. Philip Ackroyd, a member of the Yorkshire committee and in the fifties a keen club cricketer with a team known as the Ratts, recalls the earnest Boycott playing for his side because ‘he wanted a game every day of the week’. Ackroyd recalls ‘a brilliant century he made for us, getting his hundred before lunch. He was a fine strokemaker, an excellent hooker and puller. Nobody played the short ball better.’
Ackroyd admits that, even then, he could be a controversial figure. ‘He was utterly single-minded. He was a very insular young man and did not mix well. He did not drink and, because of his dedication to cricket, seemed to have no other interests. If he did come to the bar, he would only talk about cricket. He did not pay much heed to women either. In fact there was an umpire who stood in all of our Sunday games and he had an attractive daughter. We tried to push them into each other’s company. She thought the world of Geoffrey but he was just not interested, not at all.’
But Boycott was far more interested in women than Philip Ackroyd could have known. While he was still at school, he had privately confessed to a friend his deep attraction to a local girl, even joking about a possible engagement so that he might be able to go beyond just a teenage kiss. In his job at the Ministry of Pensions in Barnsley, his liking for female company was obvious. His first supervisor told me: ‘There was a rather pretty girl in the office and on one occasion he took her into the manager’s office and tried to kiss her but she broke away. I remember that well because she told us all about it.’ The way Boycott deceived so many contemporaries over his attitude towards the opposite sex was through the simple expedient of remaining highly secretive about this side of his life. Unlike other young men, he was rarely one either to boast of his conquests or to parade his personal feelings. And this was to be the stance he adopted throughout his career, where his urge to seduce was matched by his desire to remain private.
But there was one relationship he could not keep secret. While working at the Ministry of Pensions he met Anne Wyatt, an attractive, raven-haired married colleague with whom he was to share his life, in the most unconventional manner, for the next four decades. Contrary to subsequent press reports, she was not his supervisor but on the same grade as Boycott as a clerical officer. Fourteen years older than him, she was born Ethel Senior in Barnsley in 1926. Her marriage had not been particularly happy before she became involved with Boycott, and she often spoke to colleagues in derogatory terms of her husband, Bob Wyatt. But once Wyatt found out about his wife’s affair, he is said to have been so infuriated that he threw all her belongings out into the street, forcing her to move in with her parents. Later, he took even more drastic action to escape his failed marriage, emigrating to Canada.
Ethel Wyatt’s romance with Boycott led to a transformation in both her appearance and her name, according to Boycott’s supervisor. ‘When I first knew her, she was a buxom lady, well-dressed but hardly glamorous. But after she began the relationship with Geoffrey, she went on a crash diet, lost several stone and took to smart suits and high heels. She never wore the same outfit two days running. Before she was with Geoffrey, her hair had grey streaks. But then she had it dyed black and wore it long. She would disappear two or three times a day to do her makeup.’ In 1960, she suddenly announced that she wanted to be known as Anne rather than Ethel. Their work colleague says that she and Boycott soon became quite open about their affair: ‘They used to meet in a little room at lunchtime, and anyone else who had to go in there felt uncomfortable. I liked her but she was not the most popular person in the office. Her hackles could easily be raised and she was quite prickly. I think some of the ladies were jealous of her because she was so far ahead of them in style and fashion.’
Anne Wyatt was always sensitive about the difference in age between her and Boycott. On England’s trips abroad, for instance, she was reluctant to give up her passport to tour management for safe-keeping, though other wives and girlfriends happily complied with this requirement. But pseudo-Freudian claims that she has been a ‘mother figure’ to him are little more than psychobabble. Why would Boycott need or want such a figure when he was living with his own devoted mother – and would continue to do so for almost two more decades? And how many sons have mothers only fourteen years older than themselves? For Boycott, according to his uncle Algy, the attraction is easily explained: ‘Young men are drawn to older women. When you are young there is a sense of mystique about them and Geoff went down that road.’ Boycott’s childhood friend Malcolm Tate perfectly understood why he should fall for her. ‘He was only eighteen and she was a really lovely lady of about thirty. She was intelligent, smart, glamorous, what you would call “a cracker”. She was pleasant, easy to talk to. Geoff’s mother thought the world of her. Anne was a great influence on Geoff.’
She and Boycott had much in common. Both from mining families, they were always immaculate, intensely private and never afraid to speak their minds. Because her father was a local umpire, she had been brought up to understand cricket, always a necessity with Boycott. ‘She mirrored a lot of Geoffrey,’ says his friend Tony Vann. ‘She’s forceful, very straight, knows where she’s coming from.’ Where they differed in their personalities was that Anne appeared much better mannered than her partner, never going in for his public displays of rudeness. Peter Kippax, who knew both reasonably well, says: ‘I found Anne a lovely person. She was genuinely nice, nice with my children when they were very young and that counts for a lot. When we were playing cricket, my wife sat with Anne and they always got on well.’ But even Anne could be exasperated by Boycott’s moodiness. Kippax recalls an incident when he happened to run into Boycott in Hong Kong – one of Boycott’s favourite cities – and he and some other players happened to walk past the pair in the street: ‘Geoff just blanked us, didn’t say a word. Then Anne turned round to me and said, “It’s one of those days, Peter, you know what’s it like.” I just said, “Yeah, it’s OK.”’
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