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Cricket CV: Lengthy, and he hasn't finished yet. It's over forty years since the bespectacled lad from a small mining community near Barnsley fulfilled the second of his two boyhood ambitions by adding his first England cap to earlier appearances for his beloved Yorkshire. Boycott built the most impenetrable defence in Test cricket round his determination never to play beyond the limit of his own abilities, and while his approach was often seen as selfish it remains a fact that England only lost 20 of the 108 Tests in which he played. Stubborn, doughty, bloody-minded; call him what you will, this one-off is England's finest opening batsman of the last four decades, and would surely have passed 10,000 Test runs had he not dropped out of the game for 30 Tests in the middle of his career. Still and all, 8,114 at 47.73 is a handy wedge by anyone's reckoning. His 22 centuries for England is a record he holds jointly with Walter Hammond and Colin Cowdrey, with the small matter of 151 first class hundreds in total.
Career highlight: He became the first man to record his 100th first class century in a Test match, and did it in front of his adoring home fans at Headingley against Australia in 1977.
Extraneous: He's the only England player ever to have batted on all five days of a Test match, aganst Australia at Trent Bridge in 1977 (although it sometimes felt as though he did it quite frequently); he faced the first ball in ODI cricket, and was the first man out in the international limited overs game.
Most likely to say: "Roobish", "Proper creeckit", "The future is now", "My granmoother could have played that bowling" (when discussing contemporary West Indian pace attacks), "Corridor of uncertainty".
Least likely to say: Anything even remotely resembling an apology.
Not to be confused with: Anyone else.
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