Heroes and Contemporaries (Text Only). David Gower
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and New Zealand in 1977–8, when Brearley was injured, he was then overlooked when the question of Brearley’s successor arose, in favour of Ian Botham, Brearley again and then Keith Fletcher. Yet Boycott served under Botham happily enough and again under Brearley during that epic 1981 series against Australia. Any misgivings about his availability for a long and difficult tour of India and Sri Lanka were also put aside where he began by fitting in perfectly and doing his job. There were no clouds on those Indian horizons.
To someone as dedicated to scoring runs as Geoff, it must have meant a great deal to him to pass Sobers’s record of aggregate Test runs, becoming the heaviest scorer in Test history. Breaking a record of the greatest cricketer of all time is an achievement anyone would have cherished. So it was all the more sad that he should almost immediately retire to his sick bed after Delhi, leaving himself open to criticism and jibes and initiating the first rumours that he might be going home.
I wasn’t in the dressing-room that dramatic afternoon in Calcutta during the Fourth Test when he is alleged to have appeared from that sick bed and invited team-mates to a round of golf. Whether he actually took his clubs or just walked round the course I don’t know, but by the evening stories were circulating among the players. Officially he was still unwell, although the various doctors called in seem to have given differing accounts of the virus responsible. What isn’t in dispute is that Geoff had appeared for lunch that day at Eden Gardens, quiet but bright; he didn’t have to crawl in, despite having been in bed for a week. England had finished batting so that all he had to do was field. But he didn’t make any fuss, merely packing his bag and saying that the doctors thought him unfit to field and that it would do him some good to stroll around the golf course.
Cricket’s unofficial code of conduct lays down that unless you are injured or genuinely unwell – not just off-colour – then you take your place in the field, through the heat and burden of the day. It was Geoff’s apparent flouting of this code, more than anything else, that enraged other members of the team. At that time, in Calcutta, I doubt if a single member of the party was a one hundred per cent fit. We all had complaints about little things, coughs and sneezes, tummy rumbles. Whatever afflicts you in India, Delhi-Belly or otherwise, the normal approach is to keep taking the tablets and keep eating what is available to keep your strength up. The right example had been set by Bob Willis who had been really ill for the first month of the tour; he would sit in the dressing-room, after night upon night of sleep disturbed by stomach aches and bathroom visits, only just able to keep his eyes open. If anyone had the right to pull up the ladder it was Willis. Geoff had made do with the steaks served in the best hotels but was much less happy with the food served up-country. Even though most of us felt the same way, it was a question of having to make do in the circumstances. In short, when Geoff went walking instead of fielding he did not have an especially sympathetic audience.
In fact, he touched off an explosion in the England dressing-room. Botham – who would shortly afterwards go down with a nasty virus infection in Madras, sweat through all one night and still go out to bowl the following morning – was especially furious. The extreme view in the dressing-room was that Boycott should never play for England again. Another opinion was that he should be sent home immediately. A third section disagreed, believing that going home was Geoff’s objective and that he should now be made to stay to do his job in India. No-one really knew what was in Geoff’s mind at that time, only that he seemed as confused as the rest of us.
Initially the attitude of the tour management committee, Raman Subba Row, Fletcher, Willis and Bernard Thomas, seemed to be that Boycott should stay. No-one was having the time of his life; going home, at that point, could seem to be a privilege and an allowance denied the rest of the party. Why should Geoff Boycott be favoured? The issue seemed settled when we heard that Geoff would definitely be going on to Madras with a view to playing in the Fifth Test. Then, while the main party went off by rail to play East Zone in Jamshedpur, rumours multiplied: Boycott was reported to have said he wanted to go, then he didn’t, then he did again.
When the final decision was taken that he could fly home from Calcutta the news was delayed, at his request, until he had actually departed, which left the press, the great majority of whom were stuck up-country in Bengal, buzzing like angry wasps. Yet by the time we arrived in Madras the atmosphere had lightened and improved. A day on the coast, a swim in the sea at Fisherman’s Cove, the first holiday of the tour for most of the party, helped to raise spirits as we digested the impact of Geoff’s arrival at Heathrow in the middle of a tour.
His early departure set up another train of questions. Did he go home early to help arrange the ‘rebel’ tour of South Africa that followed in March? I can’t believe that there can be any truth in that, although his actions laid the basis for the rumours. Only Geoff can supply the full answers to that whole episode. I can say that the initial approaches for South Africa were made before the tour of India began and that Boycott was a key figure in those approaches. He was always keen to go and that those first invitations came from him or his solicitor, Duncan Mutch, is beyond dispute.
In September 1981 the Indian Government were still pondering whether they should admit Boycott and Geoff Cook after their previous South African connections. Mrs Gandhi is said to have been finally convinced that she could take the political risk of allowing the tour to go ahead by a passage in one of Boycott’s books, in which he expressed his opposition to apartheid. While I agree that it is possible to abhor a political system yet compete with their sportsmen (e.g. Russia and Argentina) this episode seems to be an example of double-think sufficient to surprise even George Orwell.
There is no doubt that the financial considerations were tempting. Professional sportsmen will always appear to be over-conscious of their earnings to the general public. But what the public often forget, which the professional athlete is sometimes too often aware of, is that he may have less than ten years to make the best of his career. So the South African offers involved many arguments, financial and ethical. Was the offer worth jeopardizing a Test career? Would we be supporting an oppressive régime by playing in South Africa? Were we being hypocritical in even considering these offers while playing in India?
For much of the Indian tour the offers lay dormant while players wrestled with the problems. One agent did arrive by a roundabout route, a middle-man trying to give us a nudge in the required direction. We all had to become devious and secretive for an hour or so in turn while we disappeared to talk it over. Then the whole thing seemed to die. I pulled out and several others felt the same way. Once I was out I heard very little of what was going on. What was clear was that Boycott, up until the time he left Calcutta, was the keenest to carry on and go to South Africa.
After his departure it seemed to me that the great majority of the England players felt as I did and that the whole venture would collapse through lack of support. When I returned to England, to depart again on holiday, I was very surprised to read that the South African tour had started and that the party included Graham Gooch who had left me ninety per cent certain that he wasn’t going. Yet even if Geoff Boycott hadn’t gone to South Africa I doubt if he would have played for England again, no matter how many runs he scored, such was the strength of the dressing-room feeling after Calcutta. The selectors could have chosen him, of course, but they would have had to accept they would have been putting him into an England team that felt much better without him. The anger was such that no one dare say they felt sorry for him, although I think most of us were sad that he could do this to himself, that a man of his standing and prestige in the game could upset so many of his closest colleagues.
It would have been nice for Geoff to have left us at his best when he was happy, wearing his wry grin, talking to you as a colleague. I would prefer to remember the Geoff Boycott who used to offer me advice freely, and talked quietly and sensibly about all aspects of the modern game. He has contributed a lot to English cricket over a long career – perhaps it could have been more. Whatever controversies surround Geoff Boycott, now or in the future, I shall always be glad to listen when he talks cricket sense.
(CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY, MIDDLESEX AND ENGLAND)
Rodney Hogg produced the classic remark on Mike Brearley: ‘He’s the