Boycott insufferably right

Geoff Boycott is not likely to win new friends with his assertion that what England need most of all now is, well, another Geoff Boycott.

How self-serving of him to rake up the fact that he and the late Ken Barrington were dropped for "scoring too slowly" back when England could stretch a Test match into five days. Recalls Boycott: "In 1967 at Leeds, England beat India by six wickets in the first Test. G Boycott made 246 not out in an England total of 550. I was dropped. The chairman of selectors, Doug Insole, had this crackpot idea that we should be playing 'brighter' cricket. It was not enough to be playing winning cricket and that the matches lasted five days."

So Boycott drones on, trotting out such old-hat theories that the job of a batsman is to occupy the crease, block the good balls and punish the bad ones. He really is insufferable. This is particularly so because whenever he expresses a view he is almost invariably right.