Being Geoffrey Boycott

Geoffrey will be appearing on every cricket podcast around the world (The Analyst; The Cricket Podcast; The Final Word; Stumped!; Following On; The Grade Cricketer; No Balls; Sky Sports Cricket Podcast; Tailenders; Test Match Special; Zero Ducks Given, and the book will be reviewed in Wisden Cricket Monthly, the Cricketer, the Wisden Almanack and all the national broadsheets, as well as the Yorkshire Post. It will also be entered for all of the cricket book awards - the Wisden Book of the Year, the Sports Book Awards, the MCC/Cricket Society Book of the Year; the Cricket Writers' Club Book of the Year; and the William Hill. Geoffrey will also be doing book signings at Test match grounds over the summer and we are also looking at doing a possible theatre tour with Geoffrey and Jon Hotten. We will also be putting forward Geoffrey for interview on Test Match Special as well as other radio and TV programmes.

Geoffrey Boycott, one of England’s greatest ever batsmen, played 108 Tests from 1964-82. In conversation with award-winning cricket writer Jon Hotten, the hugely controversial opener gives us incredible and never-before-heard insight into his time as an international player and, more broadly, into a tumultuous two decades in English cricket.Geoffrey Boycott is undoubtedly one of England’s greatest ever batsmen. Playing 108 Test matches between 1964 and 1982, the hugely controversial opener scored a then record 8,114 runs at 47.72 – the highest completed average of any English player since 1970 – against some of the greatest bowlers the world has ever seen. When the first lockdown came, finding himself without cricket for the first time in his life, Geoffrey Boycott sat down and began to write a retrospective warts-and-all diary of each of his Test match appearances. It is illuminating and unsparing, characterised by Boycott’s astonishing memory, famous forthrightness and unvarnished, sometimes lacerating, honesty. That 100,000 word document forms the basis for Being Geoffrey Boycott, a device that takes the reader inside Geoffrey’s head and back through cricket history, presenting a unique portrait of the internal and external forces that compelled him from a pit village in Yorkshire to the pinnacle of the world game. Now 81 and still one of the most recognisable cricketers England has ever produced, Boycott has teamed up with award-winning author Jon Hotten in this catalogue of his tumultuous time with the national side. Dropped for scoring a slow double hundred, making himself unavailable to play for England for several years, captain for eight seasons of a group of strong, stroppy and extremely talented players at Yorkshire, bringing up his hundredth hundred at Headingley against the Old Enemy, seeing David Gower and Ian Botham emerge as future greats, playing under Mike Brearley in the 1981 Ashes, in this enlightening book Boycott reveals a host of never-before-heard details regarding his peers and his playing days.