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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
Boycott was soon established in the Hemsworth First XI and at 15 he was made captain. Sale recalls that he had ‘a certain streak of arrogance about his game, which came from being so much better than the other boys’. In one match against the staff, Boycott was dominating as usual. Sale continues: ‘So our fast bowler, George Pacey, came on with the threat: “Right, I’m going to bowl as fast as I can straight at his legs.” I was fielding down at fine leg and soon Boycott was regularly clipping the ball straight past me. To make such a cool response to an adult fast bowler at only fifteen showed Boycott’s talent and character. He had an excellent defence off both front and back foot. He absolutely loathed to give up his wicket and hated any false strokes.’
The cricket coach at Hemsworth, Dudley Taylor, who was also a science teacher, has equally fond memories of Boycott. ‘Because he was a late-entry pupil, he was a year older than most in his class, so he seemed more mature. He was well-mannered and hardworking, though he could enjoy a laugh in the classroom.’ Taylor says that Boycott was good at all games, even basketball, and remembers him as a ‘brave and determined full back in rugby’. As with his soccer, his rugby skills aroused an interest beyond school – Boycott played in one Under 18 trial match for South Yorkshire District against Wakefield. Once more, however, it was his cricket that most impressed Taylor. ‘I knew even at thirteen that he would go on to play for Yorkshire. He was a more expansive player then but that is probably because he was in a different class to the other boys. I will never forget the way he played the pull. It was so effortless and the ball sped to the boundary, whereas the rest of us were liable to hit the ball in the air when we attempted that shot. In fact, he was so confident about technique that he actually used to coach the staff team in the nets.’
The tension that characterized many of his relationships in later life appears to have been largely absent during his time at Hemsworth, possibly because Boycott felt relaxed in his pre-eminence. Roland Howcroft, a schoolmate of the time, says: ‘He was always quite confident; there was no sense of insecurity about him. He was just a normal lad, liked normal things. On the buses to away games, for instance, he would join in singing with the rest of us. He was always outstanding at cricket, of course. Even in those days he was deadly serious about the game, was never a slogger or tried to hit over the top.’
Another of his Hemsworth contemporaries, Peter Jordan, now a journalist, says: ‘He was mature, sensible, never involved in any pranks and because he was serious and dedicated he seemed much older than the rest of us. Yet you could not have described him as a loner. He joined in everything at school and could take part as well as anyone in school debates. But there was never any bullshit with him. He never just talked for the sake of it but if he had something to say, he’d say it.’ Jordan was sure that Boycott would play for Yorkshire because of his determination. ‘He wanted to practise all the time. It was almost as if he was on a crusade. When he was out, he often didn’t come back into the pavilion but would sit on his own, holding an inquest on his dismissal. He was friendly and polite to the girls but nothing was going to stand in the way of his cricket, he was that dedicated. If he’d gone into medicine, he would be a top surgeon by now.’
One of Boycott’s closest friends at Hemsworth was the school wicket-keeper, Terry McCroakham, who therefore had some direct experience of Boycott the young bowler. ‘At this level, he was fast medium, very accurate, with a good inswinger. Because of his control, he was more reliable than many others.’ Against Castleford in 1956, Boycott had the remarkable figures of 7 for 4, though he finished up on the losing side. Like others from Hemsworth in the mid-fifties, McCroakham enjoyed Boycott’s company. ‘I never found him big-headed at all. There was no side to him, he was just part of the team. Yes, he could hog the strike but then he was a much better batsman than any of the rest of us. I don’t think he was a natural; you got the impression that he lived to practise. He was very ambitious, knew where he wanted to go.’ McCroakham has stayed in contact with Boycott and remains an admirer. ‘Just before the Leeds Test in 1964, he had damaged a hand and was having a net to see if he would be fit to play. I was standing nearby. Though he hadn’t seen me for seven years and was now an international player, he came straight over for a chat. To me, he has always been like that, unlike some other of these so-called England stars.’
Sadly, all the school records and scorebooks from this period were destroyed in a fire. However, Terry McCroakham has retained a press cutting from this period, which recorded Boycott’s largest innings for the school, when he made ‘a fine 105 not out’ from a Hemsworth total of 143 for 4 against Normanton Grammar School, ‘including two sixes and 14 fours’. Unfortunately rain brought the match to a premature end. Eddie Hambleton, another schoolfriend, remembers that day: ‘It started to rain quite heavily and the masters had a consultation. They then said that there were not often centuries in schools cricket so they would play a few more overs to give Geoff a chance to reach his hundred. When we came in about three overs later, Geoff had made 105. Back at school on Monday morning, we consulted the old scorebooks and found that the school record was 106. So Geoff just missed out there.’
The summer of 1958 was Boycott’s last at Hemsworth. He passed seven O levels and could have easily stayed on to do A levels, perhaps going on to further education. Ken Sale says that he was certainly competent enough to have gained a good degree at a red-brick university. Dudley Taylor goes even further: ‘With his brains and cricketing ability, he might well have got to Cambridge if he had been to public school.’
But two factors made him leave school at 17. First, he felt he had been a burden on his parents for too long. In an interview with the BBC in 1965 his headmaster, the late Russell Hamilton, who had been keen for him to stay on for his A levels, said: ‘Always at the back of his mind was the fact that financially he had been a big enough strain on his parents and that he really ought to get himself a job.’ The second, perhaps lesser, consideration was Boycott’s iron determination to make cricket his career, for which a university degree must have seemed an irrelevance. Everyone who knew him in the mid-fifties was struck by his single-minded ambition to become a Yorkshire cricketer. ‘Cricket was always going to be his trade,’ says Terry McCroakham. Indeed, the choice of Boycott’s occupation appears to have been dictated by his playing ambition, for the post he took up in the Ministry of Pensions in Barnsley, though mundane, offered a great deal of flexibility in his working hours. What Boycott did was to work every shift he could in the winter thereby building up extra leave that could be taken during the summer.
Yet, despite the advantages of this job for his cricket, Boycott’s early departure from school left him, in the longer term, with feelings of resentment towards the more privileged. The lack of a university education rankled, and was regularly used as a stick with which to beat his opponents in the supposed ‘cricket establishment’, with Boycott posing as the champion of the ordinary working public against the public-school, Oxbridge ‘gin and tonic brigade’. When Mike Brearley was awarded an OBE, Boycott said, ‘If I’d been to Cambridge, I’d have a knighthood by now.’ Similarly, this chip on his shoulder has also been reflected in his often boorish antics at official gatherings – ‘he could be so disrespectful. You’d be at a reception, chatting to some dignitary, perhaps an Oxford-educated bloke, then Boycs comes barging in, doing the guy down, “all the bloody same, you lot,” and so on. You would just feel so embarrassed,’ says one ex-England player who toured with Boycott. Mike Atherton, Cambridge graduate and England’s longest-serving Test captain, told me, ‘I have never had much of a problem with Geoff but I always felt he had a slight beef about people who went to Cambridge University. There is definitely a chippiness there, though in my case it may have been mitigated by the fact that I was a fellow northerner.’
Boycott worked as a clerical officer at the Ministry of Pensions from 1958 until 1963. His duties were hardly taxing for a man of his intelligence, but because of his cricket ambitions he never applied for promotion. Even in this job, Boycott demonstrated those patterns of behaviour that became so well known to his cricket colleagues. One fellow employee, who gave Boycott a fortnight’s training when he started in his post, told me: ‘I liked him and never had any problems with him, perhaps because I had shown him the ropes. But he could be very rude to others, never hesitating