'This is it, then'... The sense of an ending

It’s the last day of the first-class season, and for a few it will be the last day as a professional cricketer. Some will go willingly, some even gladly, most less so. More will be sensing that the end is not yet, but is not far away; the fine edge is ebbing from their game, sliding away bit by bit.

I’ve just re-read the pages on Geoffrey Boycott’s final seasons in Leo McKinstry’s tour-de-force biography, Boycs. The fading of Boycott’s power manifested itself in a particular way: he became almost strokeless even by his standards. In 1984, as McKinstry records, he made 60 in 52 overs against Somerset, 53 in 51 overs versus Derbyshire, 17 in 26 overs against Leicestershire, 77 in 67 overs against Sussex, 33 in 32 against Northamptonshire, and perhaps most grievously, 25 in 27 in a one-day game against Shropshire that Yorkshire lost. In all he made 1567 runs that summer at 62 per innings, but it took him 1200 overs.

Astonishingly, the following season, aged almost 45, he made another 1657 runs at 75.31, leaving him second to Viv Richards in the averages. Playing against Hampshire at Middlesbrough, facing his old friend and rival Malcolm Marshall – Macco loved to bowl at Geoffrey – he made 115 even as Marshall took 5-48 to rout the remaining Yorkshire batting.

It was still going though, and he could probably feel it. In his final season, in his last match, he needed 69 runs to make a thousand, something he’d done every year since 1962. He was playing against Northants at Scarborough. Jim Love ran him out for 61 in the first innings, and after Boycott had advised his skipper to enforce the follow-on, Northants survived and timed their second-innings declaration in such a way that he was not able to go in again.

More than a decade later, he remembered the day in an interview with the Telegraph: ‘Something had come to an end, something wonderful. I just thought, this is it then. I waited for the ground to clear. Then I wondered around on my own, among all the newspapers and food wrappers and tin cans’.

That’s how things ended for Geoffrey, because that’s how things end sometimes, alone, among the wrappers and the tin cans. It’s no less glorious in its way.

Geoffrey's anniversary

Today, as England ground India into what passes for dust in the northern summer, Geoffrey Boycott himself had to be reminded that it was the 34th anniversary of his one hundredth first class hundred, scored in an Ashes Test against Australia on his home ground at Headingley in 1977. He remains the only man to reach the mark in a Test match, a record that will probably now stand forever.

Memory jogged by Aggers on Test Match Special, he didn't need much prompting to reminisce: 'I can't say I wasn't nervous that morning, because I was, and nerves can do strange things. It took me half an hour to settle down'.

The context of that innings has been written about so often it doesn't really need rehashing here, except to say Boycott was a prodigal, returning to the side on his own terms, batting for history on his own ground in front of his own people and with the greatest mark in batsmanship staring him square in the face. The ground was over-run when he drove Greg Chappell to the long-on boundary about 20 minutes before the close.

But it was 34 years ago. Boycott the player is receding into the past. Many people who've heard him talk may not have seen him bat. I was just a kid but I remember that innings, and the last part of his career. I saw him play in a John Player Sunday League match at my old home ground at May's Bounty. He opened and got about 20 before he was caught at cover, trying to force a boundary down the hill towards the school wall. I remember he wore a cap rather than a helmet, because one of the odd rules in the John Player League was that bowlers could only have a limited run-up - I think it was eight yards, marked with a chalk line on the outfield.

I was a kid, with a kid's attention span, but I was urged to watch Boycott bat by my dad. Geoffrey was his hero on account of his impeccable technique. I had a book called Boycott On Batting, an instructional manual which, up the side of each page, had a series of pictures that worked like a flicker book and let you see Geoffrey performing several shots. That's what life was like before youtube.

But there was more to watching Boycott bat than that. The days on which he scored hundreds, which around that time were frequent, fell into a seemingly inevitable pattern. He would open, often with Mike Brearley, who you got the feeling he resented. Brearley would edge to slip, usually removing his bottom hand from the bat. You could almost feel Boycott tutt from the other end.

Before lunch he had few scoring shots. He was about defence and establishing himself at the crease. He was utterly solid, especially when playing forward, and he rarely played and missed - probably because he rarely played at anything not on the line of the stumps. His total by the break was usually somewhere between twenty and thirty.

In the afternoon session, he would cut and drive the bad ball and score with nudges off his legs from anything offline. His cover drive was struck late and with a checked follow-through, and his cut was forced off the back foot with the elbow still high. He would pass fifty after three hours or so, and by tea he might have seventy runs.

After that, with the change bowlers and the spinners on now, he would hit more bad balls. He was a master of farming the strike as he edged towards a hundred. Once he got to eighty, there was an inevitability about things, and the hundred always seemed to come in the half an hour or so before the close, whereupon he'd start planning for the next day and retreat once again. He was voracious, not so much for runs, but for time at the crease. A lot of his running was obviously selfish, and predicated on whether he wanted to face or not.

As Botham and Gower and Gooch came into the side, he became more of a figure of fun. Yet the other day, I was flipping through an old book I stumbled across, Bob Willis's Diary Of A Season, from 1978. It was the year after Boycott's triumphs against Australia, and he missed a few games against Pakistan ostensibly with an injured thumb. There was speculation as to whether he really wanted to play or not. Yet what came across clearly from Willis and the rest was that Boycott was regarded by his peers as the best batsman in England, and by some distance.

He was 36 when he made his hundredth hundred, and he went on to make another 51. Fifty one! To contextualise that figure, Mike Atherton made 54 first class hundreds in his career. Kevin Pietersen has 40. Boycott was ruthless in his way.

John Arlott, as he often would, made a telling and melancholic point about Geoffrey. 'He had,' Arlott said, 'a lonely career'. That is true, but in essence the great batsmen are alone, or at least they are when they bat. He is, in his quirky way, less alone now. I'm glad I saw him play.

Life Under The Pump

In that cheesy, sobby, magnificent old movie The Shawshank Redemption, there's a scene in which Morgan Freeman's character, world-weary, repentant killer Red, finally understands the protagonist Andy's love of rock-polishing. 'Geology's like everything,' he says in that celestial voice, 'it's just pressure and time'.

Whether Sachin makes that 100th hundred on Saturday, or if Murali takes a wicket with his last ball [or whether there's a real Hollywood ending, and both things happen], the CWC 2011 has been all about pressure and time.

Geoffrey Boycott was lambasted for his comments on the withdrawal of England's Michael Yardy with depression. The condemnation was merited if self-righteous, but Boycott, who was offering an opinion on radio immediately after hearing the news, was clumsy rather than thoughtless. Indeed, he went through something similar himself after the death of his mother and his sacking by Yorkshire, which made his thoughts worthy of further examination. His initial reaction was to look to Yardy's on-field performances as a cause. That's inevitable, given Boycott's own obsessive personality, but it doesn't make the point entirely invalid. Humans are humans, and it is always a difficult moment when one comes up against the limits of their ability, especially when that ability has done so much to define their self-image.

What's more fascinating is whether a team can have a collective psyche, and if so, whether that psyche can dominate the individual within it. How else do you explain South Africa? And how do they explain themselves? The application of pressure made the unit fold again. Can something as intangible as the past really play a part?

Time has proved one of the best defences against pressure, or at least experience has, and experience is really time by another name. In different ways, Ricky Ponting and Sachin Tendulkar have resisted it. Experience gives you options, offers perspective. They have provided the most enduring memories of the tournament - fitting given the time and pressure they've embraced and withstood.

Emails from Boycs

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Altogether now:

'Play a shot like that, on uncovered pitches? I don't think so...'

'I tell you what, I wouldn't have minded facing Xavier Doherty! You wouldn't have been able to drag me away. I could play him wi' a stick of rhubarb and a blindfold...'

'I like Kevin, he's a lovely lad, but sometimes he just does stupid things...'

'I know they like to play their shots, but the match lasts five days...'

etc.

True stories

Terrific Line and Length column over at the Times today from Patrick Kidd. A superlative Boycs anecdote and the answer to the KP question Michael Vaughan is asked the most [yes he did].

Double jeopardy

The moon landings faked, Lady Di offed by Prince Philip the 12-foot Lizard, 9/11 as an inside job... now add Graeme Smith given not out caught behind off Ryan Sidebottom at the Wanderers, 15 January 2010. Remember where you were when it happened.

TMS were first with the information that Daryl Harper, the third umpire, was not given the sound feed by host broadcasters SABC, and thus failed to hear what the rest of the world was hearing via many replays - the beefy nick from the beefy edge of the beefy Saffer skipper's bat.

Boycott was on air at the time and was instantly engaging, pointing out that most systems take time to settle, and that the ICC's Dave Richardson had done a good job in progressing the UDRS from its shambolic beginnings. He added too, that its advance is as inevitable as its mistakes.

All is true, but equally, like the slightly shifty enquiries so beloved of the Brown Government, the reliance on broadcasters for the decision-making equipment does open a gap in which conspiracies, however unlikely, can prosper. Long before the UDRS, when technology was just a TV toy, there were whispers that producers were adjusting pitch maps inwards when home sides were facing leg before shouts.

It's a point made here several times - the game must provide and pay for the equipment. And if an umpire like Harper is told the sound feed or anything else isn't available, he should be able to ask why not.

Smith got away with one, as players have been doing since the dawn of the game. But somehow the injustice is compounded when a player gets away with it twice. Buy a lotto ticket this weekend, Graeme, because your luck's in...

NB: Boycott is on rambunctious form at the moment. As well as his duties for TMS, he occasionally provides a pre-play report for the breakfast show on Radio Five Live, where he's generally interrogated by Sheila Fogerty. There were some hair-raising moments when he started, usually due to his dismissive references to Fogerty as 'luv'. But lately they've become quite a double act, to the point that this morning Fogerty felt emboldened enough to ask Geoffrey if the rumour they'd just heard that he has 'Sir Geoffrey Boycott' printed on his cheques was true. 'Oo told you that?' The great man asked. 'A South African journalist did...? he must be a double agent...'

Update from the Grassy Knoll: 'Just hearing that third umpire Daryl Harper had his volume dial set on four out of 10 when Smith's caught behind appeal was referred to him this morning. This just gets more ludicrous by the hour. Expect statements from the South African Broadcasting Corporation and the International Cricket Council in an attempt to mollify this debacle' [BBC, thanks to Brit for the spot...]

KP: opinion divided [again]

There must be something 'wrong' with Kevin Pietersen, because he's not scored a hundred a full six innings into his comeback - that's the media view at least. There were contrasting opinions as to why from Mike Atherton on Sky and Geoffrey Boycott on TMS [paraphrased here].

Athers: 'He's at that stage of his career where he has to decide what he wants from the game. Players get married, kids come along, travelling's different, priorities change and you have to ask yourself what kind of player you want to be remembered as, how much the game means to you, how many runs you want to score.'

Boycott: 'He's a big man, six feet four, and his height means he can get much closer to the pitch of the ball than most players. But he's only taking half a stride. His bat's two and a half feet in front of his pad, he's walking towards the ball, his front leg's stiff and his whole right side is getting turned around. He just needs to play straight'.

No prizes for guessing which one of these men played in the era of the sports psychologist...

'He's a great lad, I like him a lot and I like his batting,' concluded Boycs. 'But he won't listen to anybody. He just says, that's the way I play, take it or leave it'. 

Remind you of anyone, does he Geoffrey?

NB: Not that the great Yorkshireman is blind to the new age. 

Formless

Form - or more accurately the lack of it - is an ineffable link between the club player and the pro. For the amateur, much of the professional experience can only be guessed at; it's probably impossible, even on your best day, to really know what it's like to hit the ball as they do, to deliver when you really have to, to play with your future on the line.

The absence of form, though, is universal. Watching Kevin Pietersen scratch around like a mortal, I could almost feel the ball hitting the bat just slightly away from the middle, could sense the disconnect between brain and hand, could know with some certainty how he felt. We've all been there. 

Being able to do something one day and then not the next is in a way what makes us human. The subtlest of things affect us in the smallest of ways, and it all adds up. It's not really the absence of form that's remarkable, rather it's the huge and complex sequence of reactions and timing required for being in form that's the miracle.

There seems to be no transitionary state between the two, either. Form doesn't appear to come back over a period of weeks. It's absent and then present, sometimes after the proverbial shot 'hit straight out of the middle' and sometimes after a scratchy fifty that has you remembering how it feels to stay in. 

Boycott always recommended a return to basics - hit the ball in the V enough times and the rest will take care of itself. Bob Woolmer's magisterial Art And Science Of Cricket has this to say: 'Many coaches can confirm that after a shocking performance in the middle, a struggling batsman's glaring technical faults evaporate the minute he enters the nets. Because batting is a reflex that occurs at a subconscious level, the more the mind tends to override those reflexes the more likely it is that errors will develop. It is thus vital to help the failing batsman to correct the erroneous thinking patterns that have developed as a result of repeated failure. That is not to deny the need for constant vigilance on the technical side, rather to stress that a more holistic approach almost always pays off when addressing a lack of form'.

Those two approaches are not exclusive. The beautiful internal rhythm that striking the ball straight back past the bowler produces is a holistic, healing thing in itself - the heartbeat of batting.

On t'bloody net

Geoffrey Boycott has a blog. It's all-bloody-reet too. Much better than them other bloody buggers who put up vainglorious efforts done by their management companies...

I like Boycott. At 68, he remains engaged by the modern game, he doesn't seem to feel the generation gap, and considers his only duty as broadcaster to be the truth as he sees it. He has an infinitely subtle understanding of batting. That his humour sometimes grates, that he can be boorish, I accept as the spikes and contradictions of an intriguing, conflicted character. 

Contrast Boycott's views with those of Viv Richards, another hero, but one rooted in his era. Boycott is the man still looking forwards. 

NB: At risk of dating myself, I remember having this as a kid...

Nowt wrong wi' that

A superlative Boycs story:

On one of Ian Botham's first England tours the great man was struggling with form, so Beefy dropped by his hotel room to offer commiserations. Boycott was inside, naked except for his pads. He told Botham to sit on the bed, picked up his bat and demonstrated the famous forward defensive.

'Now tell me what's wrong with that,' Boycs said. 'Nothing, that's what'.

Matty Hayden walks the earth: the Ashes media, mano et mano

'Ah Paris... marvellous. The Louvre... walking up the hill to Montmartre. Fabulous city...'

Matthew Hayden paused. 'One of the great pleasures of coming over here is getting the chance to go to historic places like that.'

And one of the great, and unexpected pleasures of the summer was Matthew Hayden, who split his time between Test Match Special and the Channel Five highlights show, and who, like Kwai Chang Kane, has apparently put aside worldly things to walk the earth instead.

'I went walking around London last night,' he said. 'Summer's night, strolling around the streets, stopping at a couple of pubs for a beer... wonderful'.

For some reason, when I pictured Haydos doing this, he was in his cricket gear, too. And barefoot. As England tipped the balance of the Oval Test by running out Punter and Clarke in consecutive overs, he welcomed Jim Maxwell to the mic by saying, 'Good on ya Jim, I feel like I need another Aussie here at this point. I'm quite emotional...'

The new caring, sharing Hayden still had his sharp side, most notably in his now famous spat with Geoffrey. 

'Your batting emptied grounds, mate,' he said, no doubt out of the side of his mouth while still mentally at first slip. 

Exit Geoffrey, muttering. But thankfully not for long. Boycott got every prediction he made wrong this summer, but that's because they were almost always based on the kind of sound logic that the series refused to obey.

TMS has copped some flak, but the mix of Haydos, Geoffrey and Phil Tufnell made it a joy to listen to. Tufnell is as self-effacing as the two great batsmen are proud. Asked about his greatest fear, while others waffled about planes and spiders, Tuffers deadpanned: 'Mark Waugh'.

Sky opted for Warne as their resident legend, and once you got past the teeth - surely some kind of spin-off from NASA research - he was worth what must have been a reassuringly expensive fee. The real difference in his commentary came in his willingness to stick his neck on the line and call the play. Sky's collective of ex-England captains in the 'comm box' could do nothing but genuflect. Add Ravi Bopara to his list of Test victims. 

Beefy at least had someone to share his jokes about not training and coming in at 5am with. The heirarchy - Sky-erarchy? - revealed itself via the banter. Botham admitted Warnie to the club that contains himself, Michael Holding and sometimes David Gower. Nasser and Athers remain the butt of Beefy humour ['you'd have had about 18 by now wouldn't you Nass?' he'd enquire, just before tea]. Bumble is the mad uncle at the party, capable, like most jokers, of concealing the truth in humour.

Sky's technology is the real star of their show. Hawkeye versus Aleem Dar, super slo-mo versus Asad Rauf were heavyweight contests with only one winner.

Distraction

In a semi-successful early-morning attempt to take my mind off forthcoming events, I picked up Leo McKinstry's tremendous biography of the world's greatest living Yorkshireman, Geoffrey Boycott. 

It was a section about Boycott's first tour to South Africa in 1966. It wasn't just a different game, back then, it was a different life, a different Britain [and, of course a far different South Africa]. The head of selectors was Walter Robins, an eccentric self-publicist who used to go to the cinema when he found the cricket boring to watch. Dropping two leading batsmen, Tom Graveney and Colin Cowdrey, Robins then selected Mike Brearley, who was still a student at Cambridge, ahead of John Edrich and Mickey Stewart. 

Ted Dexter, the era's rough equivalent of Kevin Pietersen in terms of batting flair, arrived in South Africa almost a month late, because he'd been standing as a parliamentary candidate in the general election. None of this seemed to cause any particular disquiet.

The players were expected to play: Boycott batted 10 times before the first Test match, and made over a thousand first-class runs on the tour. It was effectively a season of cricket.

Boycs ran Dexter out as soon as Ted got there of course. With both stranded halfway down as Boycott tried to nick the strike, Dexter's last memory was of Geoffrey diving back past him to make sure he was in. Superb.

Now for Lord's... 

Geoffrey and Michael, ebb and flow

There is [if you believe Steve Harmison at least] a tendency for modern players to disregard Geoffrey Boycott. Yet here he is on Michael Vaughan today:

'Ultimately, I think his mistake was to try to play the same way for the rest of his career. Cricket is like life, it ebbs and flows, and you go through good times and bad. The trick is knowing when to eke out a gritty, ordinary half century, and when you are in terrific form and can get onto the bowlers'. 

That is just about as perfect a summary as you can get of Vaughan's last two years.

Geoffrey went on to praise Vaughan, and rightly so. His reputation in England will grow.

NB: Andrew Flintoff, however, is becoming a fucking buffoon. It's not so much that he missed the bus, it's what he missed by missing the bus that matters.

MPV player

Hear that? The unmistakable sound of an engine starting up. The engine of the Michael Vaughan bandwagon, that is. 

Everyone knows that Michael's been hitting it nicely in the nets. Goes without saying. But now he's hitting it nicely over in Abu Dhabi, too, where the previously underestimated Pro Arch trophy has assumed its rightful status as the series that will decide the fate of the Ashes.

On the hallowed turf of the Zayed Cricket stadium, MP Vaughan of Michael Vaughan's Yorkshire took 115 from the Surrey attack, a century that's got everyone talking.

'He looked exceptional, ' said Graham Thorpe, in attendance in his role as Surrey batting coach, 'It's the first run out for everybody, but apparently he's been stroking the ball well in the nets, annnnnnddd...'

Woah! Sorry, drifted off into an MPV-inspired reverie there. He's back! And he's hitt... well, you know the score.

Maybe someone should ask Geoffrey Boycott, Board Director at Michael Vaughan's Yorkshire. Oh, they have: 'He hasn't made runs since he pulled out of Test cricket. He came back for (Michael Vaughan's) Yorkshire, batted in around five innings, didn't add up to 20 runs, and all he's done is rested all winter. So he's got to get some runs for (Michael Vaughan's) Yorkshire to get picked. You can't pick him on reputation for something that happened five or six years ago in Australia. That's nonsense. Everybody's talking about his talent, but has he got the kick, the real desire? He's talking a good game, but I don't see any runs on the board.'

But Geoffrey, he's playing in the Zayed stadium, see, and he's hitting it really well and... 

A Bell of his own making

Leo Mckinstry's Boycs is one of those rare books that you can open on any page and find a real zinger of of a story (and if you want stories, Boycott's your man) or a nugget of essential truth. 

Mckinstry spent some time talking to Boycott's batmakers. Geoffrey would not countenance anything above 2lbs 5oz, and would often swap to one of around 2lbs 3oz if he'd been batting for several hours and was starting to tire. 

His man at Slazenger said to him one day, 'Hey Geoffrey, I've got you a good one here. The ball will fly to the boundary with this one.'

'I don't want it to fly there,' said Boycott. 'I want it to roll there. I'll still get four for it...'

To me, the story demonstrates not Boycott's contrariness, but his absolute self-knowledge, his acceptance of himself and of his game. He understood intimately what kind of player he was.

All great batsmen understand this. At the heart of Ian Bell's problem (yes, him again) is this lack of certainty. He's always being told to dominate the bowlers, and you can see him trying to do it, strutting priapically - and unconvincingly - to the wicket, trying to bat like a batsman he's not.

The notion of dominance is the wrong one for Bell. You wouldn't describe, say, Shiv Chanderpaul as dominant in the traditional sense. It's just that no-one can get him out. 

If Bell is to stay in the Test team, he'd do well to watch Chanderpaul score his runs. He, like Boycott, is utterly true to himself, however odd that self might seem. All the best players are. 

NB: With aching predictability, Bell and Harmison failed to make the IPL auction cut today. Know thyselves, my friends...

Boycott's Red Riding

Novels about sport are a bit like Naomi Campbell: notoriously difficult. The trick, if there is one, seems to be to take the sport out, or at least to use it as texture. The most successful for some years, artistically and commercially, must be David Peace's The Damned Utd, a reimagined secret history of Brian Clough's 44 days as manager of Leeds United in 1974.

Peace's take on the tropes of soured northern manhood, from Clough's alcoholic revenge-fuelled fantasies and paranoias to Don Revie's obsessive secrecy and compulsive planning took place at a football club, but weren't really about football. His real subject, as he has mentioned several times, is Yorkshire and the 1970s and 80s, from the Ripper murders in his Red Riding quartet to the miners strike in GB84. 

Geoffrey Boycott, like Brian Clough, was a man of that time and place; like Clough had done at Derby County, he provoked a revolution by being sacked. When Yorkshire CCC refused to offer him a new contract in the October of 1983 a winter of civil war followed, a war that concluded with Boycott's reinstatement and the departure from the Yorkshire committee of  Fred Trueman, Billy Sutcliffe and the terrifying Ronnie Burnet. The people had risen up behind Geoffrey.

It's a perfect subject for Peace's writing, and he has said that he has begun researching the story. I hope he writes it; his Boycott will have Shakespearean dimensions, and Geoffrey deserves a mythology of his own.

The Red Riding stories have been adapted for Channel 4, and The Damned Utd movie comes out this spring, with Michael Sheen as Clough. Which leads to the glorious proposition of Boycott: the movie. Sheen's a natural for Clough, but who could possibly play Geoffrey, and who could capture Frederick Sewards Trueman? All suggestions welcome.

Boycott, the lion in winter

Last week, The Guardian sent four of their writers to meet their childhood heroes. Stephen Moss chose Geoffrey Boycott (read his piece here). Geoffrey was, and probably still is, my father's hero too. For me, he was too distant and unknowable; even for an obsessive, his obsession was palpable. He could be glimpsed in the books I bought and collected; the tour diaries that made him the butt of team jokes about his hair transplant and his baked bean diet; the autobiographies that recounted anecdotes of run-outs and faux pas and boorish one-liners. 

We thought all of his character was there in his batting, which was courageous, selfish, monomaniacal and technically unsurpassed. Me and my dad watched the World Cup Final of 1979 from the top tier of the Compton Stand, underneath the clock. West Indies got 286 (from 60 overs - when ODIs used to last a day...) a total that seemed like the sheer face of a glacier back then. Boycott and Brearley set out in dogged pursuit against Roberts, Holding, Croft and Garner (the concept of a one-day specialist did not really exist - how easy life was). After 30 overs England were 129-0. They needed 157 from 30 overs with 10 wickets in hand. This was thought an impossible chase, and a middle order of Randall, Gooch, Gower, Botham and Larkins folded to Croft and Garner, England were all out for 194 and still had nine overs left. Such was one-day cricket in 1979. Boycott had batted beautifully to his own internal rhythm. Holding got him for 57. 

Two winters later, Holding bowled him that famous over in Barbados, supposedly the quickest of all time. Boycott said, 'it was the only time I got out for nought and didn't feel a profound sense of failure'. It's rarely mentioned that he went to Antigua two weeks later and made 104 not out against Roberts, Holding, Garner and Croft. He was 41 years old. 

'Watch Boycott' was the eternal advice of my youth, from my dad at least. What he loved about him was not just his excellence, but the way he walked out to bat, immaculate, a state exacerbated when he opened with Goochie, who tramped out there looking like he'd just climbed off a park bench. I realise now that what my dad liked was the way Geoffrey's look represented his state of mind: nothing left to chance. 

The great day finally came when my father met Boycott. He'd worked on the refurbishment of Lillywhites at Piccadilly Circus, and Boycott came to the grand opening. My dad collared him for ten minutes, and Boycott was charm personified. The words that came down from the mount for me were 'bat for as long as you can, and never mind the other boogers...'

It wasn't until he retired - at 46 - and took to the commentary box that it became obvious that you couldn't know Boycott just from his batting. He turned out to be a womaniser, a raconteur, a man of unvarnished truth and insight, and full of quirks too. Last summer on Test Match Special, he revealed he was a big fan of Feng Shui. Most of all, as Stephen Moss's lovely piece showed, the lion in winter has been mellowed by cancer, his fire drawn by fatherhood and marriage. In an audio clip, Moss recites Geoffrey's well-known claim that he'd give up the rest of his life for five more years at the crease, in his prime. Well no more. Living had conquered his obsession at last. 

My favourite Boycott story comes from David Lloyd. Boycott called him one day, and, as is apparently usual, began talking with no introduction.

'You and me, playing golf, 9.00am this wednesday'.

'I can't Geoffrey, I'm going fishing,' was Lloyd's reply.

'That were always your problem, fishing outside off stump,' said Geoffrey, and hung up.