Heroes and Contemporaries (Text Only). David Gower

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СКАЧАТЬ ever suggested he lacked the ability or the shots to score quickly. He may not have been too happy playing that kind of cricket but he did leave a huge Australian crowd gaping and gasping for more. It was such a shame that he played like that only when his place was in danger.

      That was on 11 December 1979. A month later all had gone sour again. A violent thunderstorm flooded an unprotected Sydney Ground (the ground staff were celebrating New Year’s Eve) and, as several experienced observers predicted: ‘Whoever won the toss won the Test.’ Greg Chappell won and although Boycott didn’t want to play, complaining of a stiff neck, Brearley insisted, saying: ‘I don’t care if you are slightly unfit, I want you to play, I want you in.’ England were 1–0 down in a three-Test series and we needed to be at full strength. It was a dreadful wicket to bat on, Boycott getting 8 and 18, but his attitude was never of the best. It was a time he would like to forget and we with him.

      I didn’t see much of Geoff in the next home series against West Indies, being dropped from the team after the First Test at Trent Bridge. But the West Indians did pay him the compliment of making him their prime target and we all admired the way he stood up to what must have been the most concentrated fast attack in history. He survived. At the age of forty he played through nine Tests against them, at home and in the Caribbean. Clive Lloyd knew very well that Geoff was always the stumbling block. There was much blocking and much more testing of that well-tried defensive technique: he batted on tremendously in his own style, got a century in Antigua and it was no exaggeration to call him the pillar of the team.

      He also seemed to have accepted, philosophically, that his long-standing ambition to become England’s captain was unlikely ever to be fulfilled. After he had taken over the reins briefly in Pakistan 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 СКАЧАТЬ