Farewell Geoffrey Boycott

Geoffrey Boycott will be eighty on October 21. So it is hardly surprising that the BBC has decided to call time on him as a member of the Test Match Special team. Writing in The Guardian Andy Bull agreed: “it’s fair to say it was long past time for Boycott to go and that his particular style of commentary is out of place and out of time in an era when the game is trying so hard to broaden its appeal.”

Well, there have always been many for whom Boycott had no appeal in both his playing days and his subsequent career as a commentator and pundit. The list of his critics, even enemies, is a long one, perhaps even as long as a list of his friends, admirers and supporters. Still, one should take this talk of cricket seeking to broaden its appeal with a degree of scepticism. “Broadening the game’s appeal” often seems to mean making it less appealing to those who already love it.

As for Boycott I have no doubt he has offended many over the years, but equally no doubt that he has pleased at least as many and still meets with their approval. If you want intelligent analysis he remains one of the best. You learn more from him than from most. I would say that only Michael Holding is as instructive.

Of course he is often wrong. Who isn’t? His claim in The Telegraph that “to offer expert analysis you need to have experienced the heat of Test cricket” seems to come close to nonsense. Few successful football managers were great players themselves; some never even played at the top level. There are good coaches in every sport who were themselves no more than of average ability in their playing days. Conversely there are great performers who later prove inadequate critics, sometimes perhaps because their natural ability was such that they may never have felt the need to think deeply about their game.

Boycott made himself into a great batsman, a very great one indeed. He didn’t look like this early in his career. In an article in Wisden celebrating Tom Graveney’s century of centuries, Neville Cardus wrote disparagingly of the young Boycott as “an artisan building his brick wall of an innings”. That was in 1964 and it was then fair comment. Ironically perhaps Graveney was Boycott’s hero: “elegant, lovely player,” he told Cliff Morgan in a radio interview in 1987, “aesthetic, front foot, back foot.” In fact, Boycott has always been appreciative, even modestly so, of others’ genius. He would have liked to bat as Brian Lara did.

He rarely destroyed attacks though in Australia in 1970-71 he did so repeatedly. He had however remarkable concentration, rare technical ability and the courage that all truly great batsmen need. No English batsman of the last half-century except perhaps Graham Gooch has been a better or braver player of really fast bowling. He had the rare ability to stay at the wicket even on days when he couldn’t time the ball. There were days, especially early and late in his career, when he was very slow, and it’s unfortunate that this is what many remember him for. But I never found him dull to watch. There was character in everything he did, often a difficult, crusty, infuriating character, but never anonymity.

There are innumerable stories of Boycott behaving badly and it’s no secret that he was often disliked by his team-mates. But there are just as many stories of kind and generous behaviour. Graham Gooch for instance calls him not only a good coach but a good friend, “the first person I turn to.”

As a commentator, a remarkable tribute once came from Bill Sindrich, an American with a love for cricket, who recruited him for Transworld, the TV company that then had the contract to produce the coverage for Sky: “If you blindfolded Geoffrey after something happened at real speed, and then you asked him to narrate the replay at slow motion, without seeing the screen, he could do it. The incident will have formed an image in his mind so precise and immediate, he does not need to look at the replay. That is a unique skill.”

Evidently one that is no longer needed, though I would guess that even in his eightieth year, Boycott still possesses it.

I spoke earlier of the generosity of his judgement of players who could do things that he acknowledged were beyond him. With this has gone a readiness to move with the times.

Unlike many former stars he has never settled into the grumpy mode of being “laudator temporis acti”. Unlike Boycott, Fred Trueman one of my boyhood heroes, the greatest of all English fast bowlers I have watched, became tiresome in his last years on Test Match Special, muttering things like “I don’t know what’s going on out there”.

Well, with eighty in sight, it seems that Sir Geoffrey is about to be put out to grass, “ageism” being almost the only permissible “ism” these days. One hopes not. The old boy still knows just what is going on out there and surely has a canter left in him. But memories will remain of that gravelly voice and his clear judgement, and there will also be the pictures in my mind’s eye: of Boycott on the back-foot hitting the ball through the covers, a shot he played better than even Joe Root does today, and, certainly, of that on-drive off Greg Chappell at Headingley in 1977, the shot that brought up his hundredth hundred, a stroke played with perfect balance. Show the clip to any young player trying to master that most difficult and necessary of strokes.