The Test Career of Geoffrey Boycott [2] Quiz

Answer: Boycott was run out by the length of the pitch

This was the first match in which these two slightly unpredictable runners between the wickets had opened the England innings together, and the ensuing run-out episode seemed rather comical to some of those not closely involved. The incident ended with both batsmen stranded at the same end and with Amiss, as he grounded his bat, being seen to turn his back pointedly on his furious teammate. To add insult to injury, the Warwickshire batsman then cruised to 138 not out, during the course of which innings discontented growls of "them's my runs" were allegedly reported coming from the dressing room.

This match was also remarkable for an astonishing fightback by the Kiwis when, set a massive 473 to win, they fell only 37 runs short thanks to an epic display of classy batsmanship by their captain, Bevan Congdon, who scored 176 and took them to the brink of what would have been a historic victory.

Answer: falling asleep

One of the best-loved and most humorous characters in the cricket world, Barnsley-born Harold Bird was also one of the great Test umpires, whose judgement on the field was outstanding - except perhaps, some would say, for an exaggerated tendency to stop play because of bad light. Mr Bird gave an interview to Sky News a few years ago, during which he recalled his habit of talking to himself while umpiring during a long Boycott innings: "Concentrate, Dickie, concentrate, lad, don't let him send you to sleep, don't let him send you to sleep...".

As he was much in demand as a Test umpire during Boycott's later England career, Mr Bird must have spent an awful lot of time doing this out in the middle.

Answer: It's nowt to do wi' luck, it's ability that counts.

In fact Boycott and Amiss developed into a successful double-act as England openers after their initial kerfuffle at Trent Bridge, with partnerships of 112 against New Zealand at Lord's and 105 against the West Indies at Edgbaston that same summer, and then 209 together (Boycott making 93 and Amiss going on to 174) in the second innings at Port of Spain, Trinidad in the opening Test of the subsequent Caribbean tour. England lost this Test by seven wickets after their middle-order and later-order batsmen, throwing away the opportunity so valiantly created by the openers, were routed by the veteran off-spinner Lance Gibbs (who finished with 6-108).

"Boycott is good to bat with," said Amiss in a newspaper interview, "because he is always looking to push his partner's score along as well as his own."
Some time later, the Yorkshireman wrote a very warm tribute about his opening partner's cricketing talents for Amiss's publishers to use on the cover of one of his books. The story goes that the publishers were so astonished by the lavishness of the praise that they called Boycott's agent to check whether the glowing testimonial had really been written by Boycott, or not rather by some mischievous hoaxer.

Answer: 99 & 112

On a wicket which seemed to inhibit free-scoring strokeplay, Boycott's two dour and determined innings held England's batting together like glue and, backed up by some inspired off-break bowling from the versatile Tony Greig (who took 13 for 156 in the match against the opposition's star-studded batting line-up), kept England in the game.

In the end England won the match by just 26 runs and in doing so levelled the series 1-1, much to the consternation of the Trinidad crowd who had certainly not been expecting anything like that to happen.

Answer: David Lloyd

The left-handed Lloyd scored 214 not out in the second innings of his maiden Test against India at Lord's, but in his subsequent appearances at international level was never quite able to reproduce this sort of form. Lancastrian to his bootstraps, Lloyd is an excellent source of good-natured anecdotes about his old Yorkshire foe (they never actually played in the same Test side together). You can catch him in droll form on the subject of Boycott by going to youtube.

Answer: a distaste for playing Australian fast bowling

"England Boycotted!" I think it was ex-England skipper Tony Lewis who coined that catchy phrase. But nobody could have predicted the brilliant way in which Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson would suddenly team up and destroy the flower of the English batting in this 1974-75 rubber, which Australia won 4-1. Neither Boycott nor anyone else could have foreseen how badly his contribution would be missed on this tour.

Boycott and Denness - the first-ever Scots-born England cricket captain - had reportedly not hit it off in the Caribbean the previous winter, when Denness was skippering the side for the first time. This personality clash was apparently a serious one, although one would never have guessed it from Denness's urbane praise of his opening batsman in TV and radio interviews.
As for the selectors, it may have been at this time that Boycott was first quoted as complaining bitterly that "they want my batting but they don't want me". It is fair to say that his motives for opting out of the Australian tour have been misrepresented by some people: there is no evidence that he wanted to avoid playing against the best fast bowlers in the world, and his subsequent career in fact rather proves the contrary.

Answer: Trent Bridge, Nottingham

The new England captain, Michael Brearley, had always been an admirer of Boycott's and it was no surprise when he quickly got his man back into the Test squad - and so the Yorkshire opener was recalled to Test duty on the very same ground where he had made his England debut thirteen years previously. Boycott has admitted that he felt tense at first, in spite of the reassuring presence at Trent Bridge of Harold Bird, on umpiring duty.

Boycott's comeback innings will not easily be forgotten by those who saw it. He started by running out the local hero, Derek Randall, with a terrible call, and then spent more than two hours laboriously acquiring 20 runs, at which point he offered a regulation slip catch to Rick McCosker, who put it down. With his team having subsided to 74-5, however, Boycott was still there, and in a sixth-wicket partnership of 215 with the mercurial England wicket-keeper Alan Knott - who chose this moment to register his highest Test score of 135 - the game was turned on its head, and Boycott followed his first-innings 107 with an undefeated 80 which steered England to a seven-wicket victory.

Answer: he scored his hundredth hundred

As the late Brian Johnston of the BBC remarked at the time, the odds against a Yorkshire player scoring his hundredth first-class hundred in an Ashes Test in front of his home crowd at Leeds must have been pretty astronomical, and yet most of the Yorkshiremen arriving at Headingley for the first day's play confidently expected Boycott to do it - and they were not disappointed.
Boycott batted long into the second day for his monumental 191, dominating the England innings and being last man out in an England total of 436 (Knott's 57 was the second-highest score). By the end of the match he had become only the fourth player in history to be on the field for the entire duration of a Test match.

It should not be forgotten, either, that the England victory by an innings and 85 runs - set up by Boycott and then completed expertly by England's seam bowlers and fielders - brought the Ashes back to England surprisingly soon after the team's mauling at the hands of Lillee, Thomson and Walker in Australia in 1974-75.

Answer: the England players refused to accept the Pakistan team as selected

The origin of the dispute lay in World Series Cricket, the brainchild of Australian tycoon Kerry Packer, which had enticed many international cricketers into its orbit and deprived England of some of its key players. Unlike other countries' ruling bodies, however, the Pakistani Cricket Board had not suspended any of its Packer-contracted players, and some of them were duly selected for the Third Test at Karachi. The England team, egged on by their new captain, refused to take the field until the offending players had been replaced by non-Packer men - and the Englishmen got their way. So Boycott had organised a successful players' strike within days of becoming captain! (He may have been partly animated by thinking of all the money he had himself turned down when Packer tried to entice him into his fold.)

Then, from somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere, England's pirate captain, the deposed Packer rebel Tony Greig, suddenly unleashed a volley of insults aimed at "Boycott and his cronies" - something he may later have regretted doing, since it apparently made him very unpopular for a time with the authentic England team on duty in Karachi.

Answer: 1 win, 1 loss, 2 draws

The Test in Karachi was a very slow-scoring, tedious draw, but things livened up in New Zealand with the English touring side's first-ever defeat there at Wellington, by 72 runs, after being skittled out for 64 in their second innings. Admitting that England hadn't deserved to win, Boycott added that his team "would like to be thought of as losing with grace, as New Zealand have done in the past". England gained quick revenge in the Second Test at Christchurch with a 174-run victory dominated by the youthful all-rounder Ian Botham, but anti-climax followed with a disappointing draw at Auckland.

Opinion is divided about the quality of Boycott's captaincy on this tour. He has been criticised for demanding too much from his players on the one hand, and on the other for monopolising the crease during match practice so that others did not get enough time at the wicket. He has always defended himself vigorously on this subject, pointing out for one thing that as his side's anchor-man he needed maximum practice time, and for another that he was working with Brearley's chosen players, not necessarily the ones he would have chosen himself, and some of them could not always quite live up to his exacting standards.