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.

Ramps: More Die Of Heartbreak

There's a nice piece with Mark Ramprakash in the new All Out Cricket. It's a simple idea: he was asked for 10 definitive moments from his career, and the results are short but sweet, or rather bittersweet, as things with Ramps usually are.

His final choice is his hundredth hundred, in 2008 against Yorkshire. 'There was a Test match on at the time and we were batting out a draw, so it was pretty low-key,' he says. 'Having said that, I was captain, Goughie was captain of Yorkshire and my parents came to watch, which was nice in terms of emotion. I'm in no way complacent about the achievement; I'm chuffed to bits and incredibly grateful to have had a long career but I know that only two of those hundreds are Test hundreds. When you look at the other players on that list, they're all great international players so my emotions relating to this achievement are qualified'.

He catches, in that brief paragraph, almost everything that make make him the figure that he is, the brooding symbol of an era. How much remorse echoes behind the words 'there was a Test match on at the time' - with its unspoken implication that he wasn't playing in it. Then the achknowlegement of a small group of people present who'd grasp exactly what he was feeling.

There's a tremendous wistfulness to his ambivalence, and it's gently heartbreaking that he doesn't feel worthy of his place on the list. He is. There may be only two Test hundreds, but they were high-quality ones, and there are few bowlers in the game that he hasn't bested sometime, somewhere. To put the achievement in context, Andrew Strauss made a hundred against Sri Lanka at the weekend. It was the 36th of his career. Ramprakash has been a phenomenon, and the rest is just life and its way.

NB: He also tells a good story about Dominic Cork selling him a bat for fifty quid. He got almost two thousand runs in a season with it. Corky's probably still got the fifty sheets, too...

So farewell then, Charles Coventry

You don't need to write anything when Sachin Tendulkar scores 200 in an ODI. You've seen him bat. Just close your eyes and imagine. 

But The Master [surely it's time to drop the almost pejorative 'little'...] has eradicated one of the great trivia questions: who holds the record for the highest score in ODIs, along with Saeed Anwar? Yup, it's so long to Charles Coventry and his 194 for Zimbabwe against Bangladesh. 

Regardless, Sachin now has 93 international hundreds. Seven more, and it would have to be considered one of the all-time feats of batting, the equal [at least] of the standard 100 first-class hundreds. 

Go on, lettem in...

The gentle sense of melancholy that followed Mark Ramprakash's one hundredth hundred last season was not entirely down to Ramps and what might have been. It felt like one of the game's great marks of batsmanship was sliding into the past. No current player was close enough to the line to get there; no future player would play enough first-class cricket. Perhaps Ramprakash was the last.

But statistics only mean anything if they allow for some kind of adjustment: no-one denies Grace his status despite a Test average of 32.29. Watching Ricky Ponting score a sublime, chanceless ton against England last night, another adjustment seems due. 

It really doesn't need saying that Ponting and Tendulkar are not just contemporary greats, but worthy of comparison to anyone who's played the game. They are due that accolade of 100 centuries.

Ponting has 72 by the current measure, Sachin 69. But it feels like it's time to start counting their one-day international hundreds, too: Ponting has 28 of those, Sachin 44 [44!].

The argument against has always been that ODI hundreds were scored in reduced circumstances. Bowlers were limited in the number of overs they could send down, fields have been restricted, powerplays introduced and so on. Yet could anyone watch Ponting deliver last night, or in the World Cup Final of 2003 and say that those were innings any less brilliantly constructed, any less dominant or wilfull, any less pressured or easier than a nice afternoon knock in the LV county championship division two? Was the bowling any worse, the fielding any poorer?

Between them, Ponting and Tendulkar have played 763 ODIs - almost two solid years' worth. The structure of their careers will not allow them to get a hundred hundreds in the conventional manner, so maybe the conventional manner should change with the times.

If it did, Sachin would already be there, Ponting would have arrived last night, via a glorious knock in an international game. And it's not as if the change would open the floodgates: the great Lara would still have fallen short.