Swervy said:
Boycotts primary objective wasnt to make his teams position secure, it was to occupy the crease as long as possible for his own sake...the man was far from being a team player,and really only thought about his own acheivments.
That's the simplistic view, but the truth is, I think, a bit more complex than that.
Boycott had a fairly low opinion of a lot of his team-mates, and in the teams he played in the 1970s, he was largely right - especially when you consider the 60s Yorkshire and England teams which were both far, far better.
When he exiled himself from Test cricket to captain Yorks full-time, there was an immediate upturrn: he averaged 100+ for the season and Yorkshire narrowly failed to recapture the championship, the improvement which was necessary after finishing in the bottom half the previous season.
It rapidly became his view that the success of any team he was in depended entirely on his own success, and that as long as he succeeded, the team had a chance, but if he failed, they had none.
If he was not captain, then if the captain's view of tactics and strategy was different to Boycott's, then it was wrong (in his view), and he just played the way the captain ought to have told him to play in the first place.
In actual fact, Boycott was wrong more often than the captain.
Boycott is a very selfish man, and has always looked after number one. He is also pretty plain-spoken and has put most of his colleagues' backs up in one way or another, usually by delivering his unfavourable opinion of their abilities. And he certainly knew the value of pursuing useful personal statistics in games which were moribund.
But it is also true that his reputation for selfishness rose when he carried on being the kind of opening batsman England were happy with when their middle order consisted of people like Cowdrey, Dexter and Graveney instead of the more forceful batsman he might have been expected to be as a senior player ahead of a middle order featuring the rather less appealing prospects of Mike Denness and Frank Hayes, or for a Yorkshire which no longer had Bob Barber, Brian Close and Phil Sharpe, nor any bowlers to replace Trueman, Nicholson and Illingworth.
He didn't think *only* about his own acheivements. But what he did think about was not necessarily what other people wanted him to think about.
A number of the same criticisms can be levelled at Hutton. Denis Compton certainly did: great batsman though he knew Len to be, he was continually disappointed that Hutton so ruthlessly restrained himself. It was his opinion that had Hutton played as enterprisingly as Denis knew he could when he put his mind to it, he would have outshone Bradman, and that it was a tragedy that he didn't.
And from the comments above in this thread, it seems a lot of people have the same opinion of Sutcliffe, which does not adequately explain why he was regarded as the finest hooker in the world at the time, nor why he was the one who set the pace in the Hobbs/Sutcliffe partnerships.
Hobbs is the obvious write-down name, but I'm not sure that Hutton would be his best possible partner. It's unfortunate that Test cricket started so late, because the Test stats rather obscure the likelihood that the best partner for Hobbs would have been that supreme attacking opening batsman, the WG Grace of 1874-79.
Cheers,
Mike
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