Still the Greatest Living Yorkshireman

The Old Batsman – one of my favourite cricket bloggers – had a typically lovely post yesterday noting that August 11th is the anniversary of Geoffrey Boycott’s one hundredth first class hundred. Few players will ever reach that landmark again; none will do so in a Test match. This is cricket’s loss. The Old Batsman is a few years older than me and he remembers watching Sir Geoffrey – Yorkshire folk are right – in the flesh. My memories of him are slighter: the 1981 series is the first year of Test match cricket I really remember and even then I wonder how much those memories have been corrupted by frequent reviewings of old VHS tapes of “Botham’s Ashes”.

Even as a seven year old, however, I knew that Boycott was a boring batsman. My father, a Yorkshire supporter these past 60 years or more, would tell me that in Boycott’s youth the great man was capable of scoring at a decent lick and that Geoffrey’s reluctance to hazard adventure was situational, not necessarily characteristic.