Batsmen must be driven, ambitious and greedy, but they must not be so to the detriment of the team
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As always, there are two sides to every coin. What some perceive as self-denial channeled through great mental discipline, others perceive as pure selfishness. Boycott's detractors argue that he did not play the way he did because that was important to the success of the team, he played the way he did because his own success was more important than that of the team.
Boycott, they would have you believe, was the sort of chap who would argue that while there was no “I” in “team”, there was certainly an “I” in “cricket”.
The marathon innings, the self-discipline, the game plan that was focused on first ensuring that the team could not lose; might they all be viewed through the lenses of selfishness? After all, this is the man who was dropped after scoring 246*, for batting too slowly.
Perhaps an addendum is required here: he scored too slowly and contrary to the game-plan of the team. Test cricket has been built on graft and patience, and there is a difference between scoring slowly and scoring selfishly. It is the latter that has been levied against Boycott as an accusation.
It is important to qualify what constitutes as being selfish though. Cricket, though ostensibly a team game, comes down to a series of one-on-one battles between batsman and bowler. Batting or bowling for individual glory is not selfish in of itself. Batsmen must be driven, ambitious and greedy, but they must not be so to the detriment of the team.
The first name that springs to mind when thinking about giants of the game who have been accused of being selfish is Jacques Kallis. Was the great South African all-rounder a selfish player? Before we get into that, a comparison is in order. Stylistically at least, the player most closely associated with Kallis is Dravid.
Selfish is the last word you would use to describe Dravid. He reinvented himself as an ODI finisher, kept wickets so India could play an extra batsman in the ODI team, and was shunted up to open in Test matches repeatedly, even though he had voiced his preference for fulfilling the most thankless of all tasks in Indian cricket - coming in after a flimsy opening pair and before one Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar.
Both Dravid and Kallis built legendary careers through graft, patience and technically impeccable games.
There is little to separate them numbers-wise; Dravid scored 13,288 Test runs at an average of 52.31 and a strike rate of 42.51. Kallis scored 13,289 Test runs at an average of 55.37 and a strike rate of 45.97. In the one-day arena, Dravid scored 10,899 runs at an average of 39.16 and strike rate of 71.24, while Kallis scored 11,579 runs at an average of 44.36 and a strike rate of 72.89.
In fact, even after discounting the small matter of 292 Test and 273 one-day wickets, Kallis has a superior average and strike rate in both formats of the game. Therefore, at face value at least, to even consider calling him selfish seems absurd, disrespectful and sacrilegious.
Dravid was never accused of batting for his average. He carved a very successful career for himself despite the limitations of his game, through sheer hard work and a desire to do whatever was best for the team. Kallis, it could be argued, had a very successful career despite himself.
By no means am I questioning the hard work he put in; in fact, Matt Prior tells a story of Kallis “pounding away on the treadmill in the gym for half an hour as if he had done nothing all day", after having played a match-winning innings and taken wickets in a South African ODI victory over England. Even so, there is a sense that Kallis could have been so much more had he given full freedom to his considerable array of strokes.
Is that enough to classify him as selfish? Like Boycott before him, was he a supremely talented, extremely hard-working player who could have been so much more had he chosen to be? Were any of his innings detrimental to the team’s chances of victory?
Apart from an innings against Australia in the 2007 World Cup, where he scored 48 off 63 balls in an unsuccessful chase of 377, you would be hard pressed to find evidence of selfish batting from Kallis. Even in that particular instance, one could make the argument that he was playing the anchor role while more explosive players played around him.
Perhaps another word can be used to describe Kallis - perfectionist. It was not quite a fear of failure, it was merely a cold-blooded, pragmatic way of approaching the game that made him play the way he did. Not for him were the highs and lows of a more exhilarating style of play; he would rather be consistently boring. Perhaps consistent and boring is more apt. Did that make him selfish? If you believe in black and white answers, yes.
Theoretically, if Dravid and Kallis had similar styles of play and similar numbers, and Dravid is considered the consummate team man because he did everything he could for the team, does it not make Kallis selfish if he did not do the very same thing? But cricket is not black and white. It is true that with his incredible gifts, Kallis could have been so much more; the stroke-play of latter year ODI Kallis is proof of that.
Had he not designed his game to ensure that first and foremost he did not fail, an approach used by Boycott as well, you cannot help but think that such a supremely talented and hard-working cricketer could have ended up an even better player than he was.
Kallis did not go the extra mile. But was his pragmatic, risk-averse approach selfish? Or was it merely a boring, self-centered but successful approach to batting? And might we use the same paradigm to understand Boycott’s game?
How much of a role does match situation play in determining whether a player is being selfish?
I suppose it is the match situation that determines whether a player is being selfish. By all accounts, Boycott’s 246* was selfish - not because he scored slowly, but because the opponents, pitch and match situation dictated that he score quicker.
Alastair Cook’s marathon double centuries in Brisbane and Abu Dhabi were masterclasses in attrition. Yet, they are rightly held up as great innings by a great player. The difference between Cook’s epics and Boycott’s novel that should have been a novella are the different match situations. Put quite simply, the match situations Cook found himself in demanded innings of that nature, but the one Boycott found himself in did not.
If selfishness is definitively a trademark of the ‘Geoffrey Boycott School of Batting’, do all selfish innings qualify? At first glance, that question should be a non-starter. However, adding the “match situation” and “detrimental effect to the team’s chances of winning” qualifiers somewhat muddies the waters.
How do you reconcile the notion of selfishness in playing slowly where a match situation does not call for it, with an innings wherein the man doing all the scoring is selfish and the one slowing things to a crawl is selfless?
The innings I am referring to is Dinesh Chandimal’s unbeaten century in an ODI at Lord’s in 2011 that helped Sri Lanka successfully chase England’s 246. While they won with 10 balls to spare, his partner Angelo Matthews batted 21 deliveries for just one run in order to ensure that there were enough runs to chase for Chandimal to complete his century. It is easy to dismiss this as a case of no harm, no foul; after all, Sri Lanka won the match.
However, as they learned first-hand during Lasith Malinga’s stunning attempt at a jail-break in their 2007 World Cup clash against the South Africans, cricket has a habit of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. You cannot afford to give the opposition even a sniff of a chance; as the old adage goes, when you have them down, you keep them down.
Matthews playing out a maiden on purpose in the 48th over of a run-chase can be viewed with confusion at best and suspicion at worst. Of course, it was all rather innocent, touching even; the 21-year-old prodigy was playing his first game at Lord’s and had batted his team to the brink of victory.
Of course he deserved a century. But at the possible cost of a win? Cricket has no room for sentiment; Dravid famously declared the Indian innings with Tendulkar unbeaten on 194 in a Test match against Pakistan.
But the real question is, who was selfish? Was it Chandimal for allowing Matthews to carry out his plan? After all, it was for his benefit. Was he culpable, even if he was not the one scoring slowly? Was Matthews’ innings detrimental to his team’s chances of victory, or can it be viewed as an innings played for the greater good of the team as it raised the confidence of a young batting star?
In fact, in the specific context of this game, one could argue that Chandimal, the partner scoring, was selfish and Matthews, the partner refusing to score, was selfless.
The fact that Sunil Gavaskar’s 36* off 174 in an ODI against England in 1975 is rightly called selfish while Matthews’ unbeaten 1 off 21 is considered selfless is proof that not all slow innings are selfish, even if they slow down run chases. Are they irresponsible? Undoubtedly. Are they foolishly sentimental? Indubitably. But selfish? No.
It is pertinent to mention here that despite all the confusion and diverging opinions surrounding Boycott’s unpopular moments - the aforementioned 246*, the time Ian Botham allegedly ran him out for scoring too slowly - his critics and supporters can agree on one thing; Boycott would have never played slowly in order to let a teammate complete a significant score.
So there you have it. The ‘Geoffrey Boycott School of Batting’ is as infuriating to pin down and understand as the man himself. As the late, great ‘Rowdy’ Roddy Piper famously said, “Just when they think they got the answers, I change the questions.”
Is it technical expertise and a risk-averse game that define it? Or is it built upon bloody-minded determination and mental strength? Does it refer to his style of play, his position as the prototypical Test match opener, or is it a function of his mental approach to the game? Can we dub all staid opening batsmen as Boycott clones? Are all players who score slowly when the team situation demands from the Boycott production line of batsmen?
I cannot say with certainty. Perhaps the easiest answer is the most widely accepted one: selfishness.
Boycott the batsman was a product of Boycott the man
I suppose how you define the ‘Geoffrey Boycott School of Batting’ depends upon how you perceive Boycott the batsman. As Carr noted, historical facts are necessarily “selective”. If Boycott’s career, like all before and all after him, is a “series of accepted judgments”, the judgment you choose to form or accept will be borne out of your perception of his game.
Personally, I believe that the ‘Geoffrey Boycott School of Batting’ refers to supreme mental strength and stiff-upper-lip-esque determination. My decision is based upon a number of factors.
Firstly, having never played the game at any sort of professional level, it is not for me to cast aspersions on the careers of great players, who have built the game, by speculating that they were selfish. Furthermore, I never saw Boycott play live and all my information on him comes from historical sources that are necessarily biased.
Max Weber’s notion of Verstehen plays a vital role in understanding this. What facts are chosen, how they are interpreted and the theories arising from these interpretations depend largely upon the norms and values that have been institutionalized within the chronicler.
For example, if an article on Boycott has been written by a Yorkshireman, he would necessarily be biased towards Boycott. As understanding comes “from within”, different chroniclers will select different facts and may also interpret the same fact differently.
It will not have gone unnoticed that three of the batsmen discussed in this piece are Indian; as I am Indian, India is the team I have followed the most closely. Therefore, it is only natural that I should select Indian batsmen while drawing comparisons.
Similarly, chroniclers of the past chose the facts that best suited their point of view. This in turn is largely based upon their social identity created by the institutionalized norms resulting from their internal environment. For example, a cricket fan who enjoys stroke-play would not consider Boycott his favourite player. That bias would seep into his account of his batting.
Essentially, we believe what we choose to believe. (Alder, 1997:326)
Secondly, as discussed, Boycott was not the first opening batsman to use the values of patience and a solid technique to great effect, and nor was he the most successful. I am willing to call the modern attacking opener a student of the ‘Virender Sehwag School of Batting’, because Sehwag truly revolutionized the art of opening and the role of the opening batsman. Boycott merely fulfilled the role handed to him to its fullest; he was a great teacher of that school of batting, but he did not found it.
Thirdly, there is something to be said for mental fortitude and discipline, the ability to overcome strife through sheer will-power. His technique may have been water-tight, but were it not for his mental strength - both in terms of focus and the belief that his method was the best method - it would have all been for nothing.
Boycott’s game needed the self-belief and focus his mental strength afforded him; that was the reason he was dogged and not a dodderer. He was able to thrive because he was confident in his own methods and secure in his own skin. Boycott’s entire career should have been set to the tune of “We Shall Overcome”, except that Boycott was not big on the concept of “we”.
Anchor Lastly, I believe that Boycott the batsman was a product of Boycott the man, and it is his mental strength and discipline that is his most recognizable and valuable trait. That it should be the defining feature of his batting is no surprise; it is the very essence of his being.
But then again, that is merely what this chronicler chooses to believe.
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