“I don’t care a toss about her, love.” – Geoffrey Boycott doesn’t get why people are aghast that he has been honoured despite his conviction for beating up a woman.
TELFORD VICE in London
RAIN, cricket and England. That’s just how things are here in summer. So there was nothing unholy about the trinity gathering over Lord’s last month on what was billed as the first day of the second men’s Ashes Test.
It’s at times like these that commentators earn their money. Without field placings to fuss about, strokes to salivate over, bouncers to babble on, and the drama of dropped catches, what’s going on out of the pressbox window — not a lot besides the groundstaff’s hard work — won’t hold an audience for long.
If the rain keeps coming, broadcasters who aren’t resourced well enough admit defeat and resort to alternative programming.
That doesn’t include Test Match Special (TMS), which has brought cricket to the BBC’s listeners since 1957. Regardless of the weather TMS is on the air and in a class of its own, at least in English.
Nowhere else is cricket presented anywhere near as wonderfully. Television has yet to beam footage as captivating as the spoken word pictures painted by the TMS team.
They’re a touch fuddy-duddy — there’s a poshness about too many of them that doesn’t sit well with those of us who aren’t — it took them far too long to involve women, and they are too accepting of the banality of those who were exponentially better at playing cricket than they are at talking about it.
But TMS is unarguably the best in the business and a blessing the cricketminded among us should count at every opportunity.
As rain soaked Lord’s on August 14, TMS went above and beyond even all that.
Cancer ended, cruelly early, the lives of Ruth Strauss and Jane McGrath. Emma Agnew is also battling the disease, and winning. Strauss and McGrath left behind them four children and two husbands: Andrew Strauss and Glenn McGrath. Agnew’s husband, Jonathan Agnew, is the BBC’s cricket correspondent and the fulcrum around which TMS turns.
Instead of filling the empty airtime with wittering about long ago exploits on faraway fields, or nurdling this way and that through a debate about who should bat at No. 5, or wondering what’s for lunch — all staples of cricket conversation on TMS and elsewhere — the three husbands spoke about their wives. And about cancer.
They talked of bravery and commitment, of love given and received, of the best times of their lives. And the worst.
They told their stories with openness and honesty, and with an uncommon softness that only added to the strength of what they said.
It’s rare to hear men express themselves with such care and goodness, more so on a prominent mainstream platform and even more so by such unvarnished examples of the species.
They were beautiful, and it rubbed off: unusually, it was uplifting to be a man listening to other men talk about women.
But the bubble has burst.
Geoffrey Boycott is an unpleasant old man. He is possessed of an ego monstrously bigger than anything he ever did as a player, which took him — willingly and profitably — to apartheid South Africa. He is a caricature of someone the world should have left behind by now; an unreconstructed bigot. He has somehow made a second career spouting clichés as profundities. He adds nothing to TMS except a rich Yorkshire accent.
None of which is news. Neither is it a secret that, in 1998, he was found guilty of the vicious assault of his then partner, Margaret Moore, in France. Moore testified that Boycott pinned her to a hotel room floor using his legs and unleashed 20 or more punches into her face, body and limbs. The photographic and medical evidence concurred. Boycott said she had injured herself in a fall.
The judge believed that evidence, as well as Moore and her blackened eyes and swollen face, and convicted Boycott — who appealled. And lost. He was given a suspended sentence of three months and fined £5 000.
It was also unsurprising that, in one of the last failures of her calamitous tenure as the United Kingdom’s prime minister, Theresa May decided to give Boycott a knighthood in her resignation honours list, which was announced on Tuesday.
Adina Claire, the co-acting chief executive of Women’s Aid, said: “Celebrating a man who was convicted for assaulting his partner sends a dangerous message that domestic abuse is not taken seriously as a crime.
“With increasing awareness of domestic abuse, and a domestic abuse bill ready to be taken forward by government, it is extremely disappointing that a knighthood has been recommended for Geoffrey Boycott, who is a convicted perpetrator of domestic abuse.”
Neither did it raise eyebrows that Boycott’s tone turned menacing when he was asked, elsewhere on the BBC, by Today’s Martha Kearney, whether the honour had taken so long to come his way because of his crime.
“I don’t care a toss about her [Claire], love. It was 25 years ago. You can take your political nature and do whatever you want with it. You want to talk to me about my knighthood. It’s very nice of you to have me, but I couldn’t give a toss.
“This is just recognition of my cricket. Very nice, very honoured, thankful to Theresa May, and I thank all the people that supported me and cared for me throughout my cricketing career.”
He claimed, wrongly, that in France “you’re guilty until you’re proved innocent” and listed that as “one of the reasons I [didn’t] vote to remain in Europe”.
So far, so Boycott. The only unanswered question in all that is why the BBC continue to employ him.
And this: what would the good men of TMS — who had at Lord’s used their platform to raise matters vastly more important than cricket — do about Boycott’s unrepentant, outrageous, disgusting answer to fair questions about his criminal past?
The question loomed when Boycott took his spot behind the microphone on the first day of the fifth Test at the Oval on Thursday. Would it be asked, nevermind answered?
That duty fell to Agnew, who greeted Boycott with: “Clanking in in his suit of armour, sword dangling by his side, visor down — I’ve called you ‘Sir Geoffrey’ for so many years, it’s ridiculous — but, Sir Geoffrey Boycott. Congratulations from all of us. Good man.”
Rain, cricket, England. And extreme disappointment.
First published by Times SELECT.
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