Heroes and Contemporaries (Text Only). David Gower

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      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.

Mike Brearley

      (CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY, MIDDLESEX AND ENGLAND)

      Rodney Hogg produced the classic remark on Mike Brearley: ‘He’s the bloke with the degree in people’ – but Hogg wasn’t being entirely benevolent when he said that. What he meant was that England’s most successful captain had a trained and tested ability to measure and judge his fellow human beings with sometimes unnerving accuracy. He was never at a loss for an assessment of the incoming batsman, never short of an idea to try to confound him. Bowlers always need to know how to get a batsman out – it’s part of their memory file – but for other batsmen to know how to remove the opposition is always so much harder and not even Mike himself would claim to be a bowler.

      That was just one facet of his talents as a captain. Add probably the shrewdest tactical brain that has led England in my lifetime and a decisiveness in his handling of cricket and cricketers, and you begin to understand the origins of Mike’s successes as England and Middlesex captain. He analysed each batsman as he walked to the crease and set the field accordingly. Should his initial strategy appear to need revision there was little hesitation in ordering an immediate re-setting, with rarely any loss of efficiency. Naturally one cannot do too much against a batsman playing well and scoring runs, but as a player under JMB I always felt confident that the right thing was being done at the right time and that if Australia were 150–2 then it was probably their fault and not his.

      He was certainly not averse to gamesmanship. He would talk about a batsman, from slip, loudly enough for the victim to hear (sometimes effective against the novice but unlikely to disconcert most Test players) and discuss field placings with the bowler as though the batsman was no more a difficulty to be removed than a fly brushed off the nose. A number of people who suffered this kind of treatment were put off Mike and termed him arrogant, but they were hardly likely to be on his level. Come to think of it, not many of us would have been on that level, considering the intelligence quotient that emanates from the Brearley brain.

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