Anxiety, collapses, swing bowlers, off-spinners, tea, and opening batsmen, especially opening batsmen. They’ve been part of the character of English cricket since the beginning – staunch, and stoical, as anyone who faces up to the new ball on a green pitch needs to be. Grace and Stoddart, Hobbs and Sutcliffe, Hutton and Washbrook. There was an interregnum then. Until, on 4 June 1964, Geoff Boycott came along. He made his debut in the first Ashes Test at Trent Bridge (c Bob Simpson b Grahame Corling, 48), with Hutton’s blessing. “Very much the sort of player who could become a class opening batsman,” Hutton wrote. “He shows the sort of qualities we associate with the outstanding batsmen of the past.”
Boycott missed the next Test at Lord’s because he had chipped a bone in a finger. “I noticed that England opened with Ted Dexter rather than picking a specialist opening batsman in my place,” Boycott remembered later. “That seemed significant, my place was being kept open.” He was right. He had won the spot. It was the first link in a chain that spanned the best part of the next six decades. From then on, England would seldom be stuck for an opener.
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