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a circle just five yards from the bat. Boycott’s response was aggressive. He immediately hit spinner Tom Veivers deep into the outfield; then, in the next he hooked Neil Hawke for six and drove him for four. Don Wilson, playing in the game, felt that the Aussies were just laughing at Boycott. ‘He’d been in for hours, block, block, block, so, to put it crudely, they decided to take the piss out of him,’ he says. But Boycott, through his ability to cope with this showy rebuke, may have enhanced his reputation with them. During the summer, Bobby Simpson expressed his admiration of Boycott, explaining that ‘he plays cricket the Aussie way’.

      Only a few days later, at the Oval, in another drawn Test shrouded in Stygian gloom, Boycott gave the Australians a further display of his temperament by hitting his maiden Test century, a knock of 113 in England’s second innings. Shirley Western, his London girlfriend, well remembers his delight at the achievement. ‘We celebrated that night by going to the theatre in the West End to see Harry Secombe and Roy Castle in Pickwick. We were walking along Shaftesbury Avenue, and I suddenly said, “Look at the billboard: Boycott Makes Test Hundred.”

      ‘“I can’t believe, I can’t believe it,” he kept saying.

      ‘Then in the middle of the show, Harry Secombe stopped and said, “I’d like to say that we have a very special gentleman in the audience who got a hundred today against the Australians.” The whole audience clapped. Geoff was so embarrassed and proud. He had never been through anything like that. We went backstage afterwards, where Harry Secombe gave us all champagne. But Geoff wouldn’t drink any, saying he had to be at the Test again the next day. He was so shy and endearing.’

      With John Edrich dropped after failures at Headingley and Old Trafford, this was also the first Test in which Boycott opened with Bob Barber, the dashing Warwickshire batsman who was to become one of his favourite partners. Both in background and approach to the game, the two could hardly have been more contrasting: Boycott, the miner’s son and cautious Yorkshire professional, whose determination to protect his wicket was matched only by his attention to his average; Barber, the Cambridge graduate backed by family money, who was as explosively indifferent to the reputations of bowlers as he was to his own statistics – ‘Cricket is far too absorbed in irrelevant numerals,’ he told me.

      Yet they built up a mutual respect which has lasted to this day. Barber says: ‘I never had a problem with him. As far as I was concerned, he was a good fella to have at the other end. And I also felt that if someone wants to lead a quiet life, for God’s sake, just let them be themselves. Now, the cricket world, like most other worlds, is a small one with a small number of people. Certain things become received wisdom. So there was this idea that Geoff, because he was determined to get on, was selfish. Well, I can tell you, there was an awful lot of selfishness around then. The real problem with Geoff was that he was more honest than some others. He was quite open that he wanted to score so many runs or get so many hundreds. Many others felt the same but he talked about it and they didn’t.’

      Nor did Barber have many difficulties in running with Boycott. They developed an understanding during the Oval Test when Barber made it clear that he would not tolerate Boycott hogging the strike by taking a single off the fifth or sixth ball of the over. ‘I simply refused to run when he shovelled the ball down to long-leg. Geoff pretty quickly got the message and, from then on, as far as I was concerned, I didn’t – until our last match together – have any problem. I would have actually said he was quite a good runner. And though he had a limited repertoire of shots, he was good to bat with because we could play off each other, left hand, right hand, attack, defence.’

      Apart from his business interests, one of the reasons that Bob Barber retired from cricket when he was still at his peak was his disillusion with the shambolic way the English game was organized, even at international level. This was evident at that Oval Test in 1964: ‘I thought the whole England set-up was extremely amateur. Virtually no thought was given to tactics. Fifteen minutes before the start of the match, I didn’t even know that I was actually opening with Geoff. I was probably picked because I was opening for Warwickshire but no one had confirmed anything. So, just before the start of the game, I said to Willie Watson, one of the selectors, “Look, who’s going in first here?”

      ‘“You are.”

      ‘“Well, how am I expected to play?”

      ‘“As you feel like.’”

      For Boycott, his Oval century proved that he had arrived as a Test-match opener. With 291 runs from four matches at an average of 48.50, he was, according to John Woodcock in the Cricketer, ‘the real find of the series. To say that he has something of Herbert Sutcliffe’s phlegmatic temperament is to pay him a high compliment. His batting does not give aesthetic pleasure so much as practical satisfaction.’ In the same magazine, the renowned Australian journalist and former Test star Jack Fingleton drew this conclusion: ‘Boycott is a good batsman. Whether he becomes more than that depends, I think, on whether he learns to use his feet down the pitch. He is so rigid in his defence that his back foot is anchored and he plays forward defensively with an exaggerated back slant of his bat. I foresee some nasty cracks on the hands against pace bowlers.’ It was this style of forward play that Boycott had been taught in Yorkshire, but Fingleton was proved absolutely right. Over the rest of his career, Boycott suffered more than his share of injuries to fingers, hands and wrists.

      Boycott’s success with England was mirrored by an equally triumphant season with Yorkshire, topping the county’s averages with 1427 runs at 59.45. In the overall national averages he finished in fifth place, having completed 2000 runs in a season for the first time. His six centuries included a career best of 177 against Gloucestershire on a big turner at Bristol in September, an astonishing score given that the West Country batsmen could only muster 47 and 84 in both their completed innings. Boycott’s achievements in the 1964 season ensured that he was named one of Wisden’s Five Cricketers of the Year, that annual certificate of excellence.

      His successful first Test series also guaranteed his selection in M.J.K. Smith’s MCC party for South Africa that winter – the last official tour England made there before the era of apartheid came to a close. Boycott’s inclusion was one of the more straightforward decisions. In making some of the other choices, the pattern of the selectors’ thinking – in time-honoured English fashion – ranged from the dubious to the incomprehensible. No room, for instance, was found either for Tom Graveney or Colin Cowdrey, while the uncapped Cambridge student Mike Brearley was picked ahead of Test openers John Edrich, Mickey Stewart and Eric Russell. Much of the blame must be attached to the selectorial chairman, former Middlesex captain Walter Robins, an impulsive, often eccentric figure with a gift for self-publicity and a habit of frequenting the cinema when he was bored with the Test.

      By the time of his MCC selection, Boycott had shown himself to be one of the best batsmen in the country. But the same could hardly be said of his fielding. For all his single-minded dedication, he had never given the same attention to this aspect of his cricket as he had to batting. And, surprisingly, Yorkshire gave him no coaching in this area. Jack Birkenshaw says that, in his early days, ‘He used to throw a bit like a woman. There was a touch of chucking the handbag about it.’ Once he had entered the England team in 1964, his fielding was nowhere near international standard, as was pointed out to him by selector Willie Watson. With characteristic application, Boycott returned to Yorkshire and, guided by batsman Ken Taylor, strove to improve his groundwork. Taylor explained to me how he assisted Boycott: ‘I used to drive him a lot to matches then because he didn’t have his own car. During the journeys, I would talk to him about fielding, explaining the importance of staying balanced, concentrating the whole time and trying to anticipate what shot the batsman will play. Once we arrived at the ground, we would practise for about forty-five minutes together, throwing the ball to each other. Geoff was always prepared to listen and learn. Though limited in ability, he had tremendous determination. Playing with him every day at Yorkshire I gradually saw his fielding improve till he became perfectly decent.’

      Boycott’s two brothers, Peter and Tony, also helped him by giving him practice sessions in the field behind their Fitzwilliam home. Peter would keep wicket behind a single stump while Tony hit the ball in all directions for Boycott to chase. Peter recalls, ‘Geoff knew he

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