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I get stuck into Boycs: “Come on, you’ll run when I tell you to bloody run. Now let’s get a move on.” I threatened to wrap my bat round his bloody neck. Soon we were getting three or four singles every over and the field started to creep in to close us down. So I said, “Listen, Boycs, if there’s anything up, just bloody belt it.” Next ball from Geoff Arnold, he cracked it through extra cover for four. No one had ever seen him hit the bloody ball off the square. The spinner came on and I said to him now, “Look, they’re all expecting you to push the bloody ball back. Hit it anywhere from long on down to deep square leg.” He smashed three in a row. He had never played like that before. The whole point was that it was a cup final. I had to take away from him the worry about getting out. I forced him to do it by relieving him of responsibility. If he got out, he had an excuse. He could say, “It’s the captain’s fault.’”

      Apart from this famous knock, 1965 was a pretty miserable season for Boycott. And his problems continued when the MCC tourists set out for Australia under M.J.K. Smith almost two months later. First of all, he developed a severe bout of gastro-enteritis after a stop-over in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, thereby justifying all his fears – often sneered at by his critics – that the childhood loss of his spleen had left him prone to infection in south Asia. While the rest of the team flew on to Perth, he was detained in a hospital in Singapore. Even when he caught up with the MCC, he was plagued by another medical ailment, sciatica, which had developed as a result of the injections administered by Singapore doctors. This meant he could only play in two of the six first-class matches in the run-up to the opening Test. One of the visitors he received while he was laid up in an Adelaide hospital was that grandest of correspondents E. W. Swanton. As he wrote in Swanton in Australia, he was immediately struck by Boycott’s passion for his job: ‘Visiting the patient, I came to know a zeal for playing and making runs that was more intense than I have ever encountered. The pain at missing this first chance of an innings was clearly far harder to bear than that of sciatica.’ As if to echo Swanton’s view, when the MCC party were asked by immigration authorities on their arrival in Ceylon to make a written declaration of the purpose of their visit, fourteen players wrote, ‘To play cricket’; Bob Barber said ‘Holiday’; Boycott just put ‘Business’.

      His clinical single-mindedness, however, did not always endear him to the other players on this tour. Jim Parks was a room-mate for part of it. ‘We used to have to share Boycs out a little bit – he wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. I remember Kenny Barrington once said to me, “I don’t think I can handle a whole tour with him.”’ The touring party had a Saturday club, where two barmen would be appointed to make sure that everyone’s glass was full. Parks continues: ‘Geoff, of course, didn’t drink much. All he would have was Cinzano, so getting him a bottle of that could be a bit awkward if you were the barman. Fine, he didn’t want to drink a lot and he was his own man. But the real problem was that all he wanted to do was talk about himself. So when you came back into the room, it was all about how Geoff had played and, really, at eleven o’clock at night, you didn’t want to hear this. He wasn’t my type of person. I enjoyed a few beers and a good night’s sleep. That said, I got on all right with him, didn’t mind sharing with him.’

      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

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