Mr Yorkshire’s great career

YOU either love him or hate him, but there is no denying that cut open the body of one of English cricket’s greatest run machines and like the letterings in a stick of seaside rock there would be the letters ‘Yorkshire’.

Not surprising, for Geoffrey Boycott is undoubtedly the current Mr Yorkshire for all his latest alleged offensive racist comments concerning West Indian cricketers who, unlike him, have been knighted.

Whether Geoffrey eventually gets his shoulder tipped by the Queen’s sword or not, my take is that Yorkshire can be justly proud of his amazing contribution to White Rose cricket and especially so for being consistently loyal to the geographic make-up of the county, stretching as it does from the Tees to the Humber.

I saw Mr Boycott a number of times when the Tykes team played at Acklam Park, Middlesbrough, and I admired his insistence that my home team was indeed part of Yorkshire so much so that one of his great friends was the late football manager Brian Clough, who, like fellow Yorkshire and England cricketer Chris Old, were born and bred in Middlesbrough.

Geoffrey’s ability to hold an innings together is surely that which should be remembered above all else for many an international bowler will concede that bowling to the great man wasn’t something they enjoyed.

However, it was at Acklam Park that Boycott and the team were humiliated by Hampshire. Bob Cotton almost on his own claimed the bulk of the Yorkshire wickets over the two innings, a fact that has rightly entered the record books on Yorkshire cricket, but for all the wrong reasons.