War of the White Roses

Stuart Rayner

Description

In 1968, Yorkshire County Cricket Club was the dominant force in English cricket, yet by 1986 it had slid to become one of the game's also-rans. "The War of the White Roses" tells the story in full from a completely neutral perspective for the first time. With insight from inside the dressing room, committee room, and from the terraces, it tells how two decades of fierce infighting caused so much damage it took almost 30 years to recapture those past glories. The period from 1968 to 1986 was scarred by bitterness, pettiness, and jealousy as civil war broke out with one of the county's greatest-ever players, the brilliant but divisive Geoffrey Boycott, at the center of the story. He is just one of the many interviewees to contribute from both sides of the divide, looking at the personal feuds and political machinations of the period, and examining just how they contributed to the team's fall from grace.

Sujets

• Condado de Yorkshire (Reino Unido)
• Críquet
• Yorkshire
• Cricket

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 01 février 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785311758
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2016
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Stuart Rayner, 2016
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 978-1-78531-116-1
eBook ISBN: 978-1-78531-175-8
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Contents
Introduction and Acknowledgements
Foreword by Chris Waters
An Era Ends, An Error Begins
You ve Had A Good Innings
The Chosen One
A Giant Among Pygmies
Club Before Country
The Purge
Turning Point
Back to Fire the Bullets
An Alternative Emerges Slowly
The Cruellest of Sackings
Oh Christ, They re Back!
Caught in the Crossfire
Pantomime by the Seaside
Player-Manager
Champs and Chumps
Revolution
Power Without Responsibility
Counter-Revolution
Finally, Boycott is Out
Postscript
Select Bibliography
Index
Photographs
Introduction and Acknowledgements
T HE War of the White Roses had only been published a couple of days, and already it looked like a new chapter might have to be written.
In March 2016, the members of Yorkshire County Cricket Club received a letter from chairman Steve Denison asking them to oppose Geoffrey Boycott s re-election to a board he served between 2007 and 2012. Great publicity for your book, more than one friend told me; but it smacked of an unwelcome re-run of some of the most depressing times in the history of a great cricket club.
If it is not already, the battle between one of Yorkshire County Cricket Club s greatest players and his supporters and the men who ran it will be very familiar to you by the time you have read this book. Sometimes the committee won, sometimes Boycott did, but invariably Yorkshire lost. Too often between 1968 and 1986 politics took precedence over cricket and the club which to this day has won more County Championships than any other rarely seriously competed for another, let alone won any.
Finally that had changed. Yorkshire won back-to-back titles in 2014 and 2015. But as I observe in chapter seven, the club has always had an uncanny knack of shooting itself in the foot when things are going well . The widely-expected hat-trick of Championships eluded them. But in avoiding another draining and damaging bout of civil war, the club showed itself to be a more mature one than the insular, conservative institution described in these pages.
When the postal votes were counted, 758 members heeded Denison s plea to opt for those with the financial experience he felt heavily-indebted Yorkshire needed rather than the vast cricketing expertise Boycott had, but was promising not to bring to bear on a team that was operating rather nicely without it. Only 602 voted for Boycott.
Not only did he accept the decision graciously, so did his supporters. The last thing I want is any trouble, Boycott told the Yorkshire Post before the vote. I m 75 years of age. I need trouble like a hole in the head.
He was just as conciliatory after the club s annual general meeting at Headingley. I m disappointed but nothing s changed, he said. I ll be here for the first match of the season.
As a Yorkshireman, it was a relief. As the author of The War of the White Roses it was vindication.
The introduction to the first edition of this book described 2016 as a safe vantage point from which to look back at the darkest period in [Yorkshire s] history . Many of the former players, supporters and committeemen I approached for interviews declined because they did not want to rake over the past when things were finally going so well again. Although I totally understood and respected their attitude, I was confident the club could withstand and would benefit from the analysis. One of the most pleasing responses to the book came from the high-ranking club official who told me it had given him a better understanding of the club s history ahead of that 2016 AGM.
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and Yorkshire s habit of self-harm in the good times makes the lessons of The War of the White Roses even more important during them. The story told in this book starts in 1968 because the seeds of the discord which ripped a proud club apart were sown in the complacency and hubris inadvertently created by what many believe was its greatest team. Yorkshire are now strong enough and the events distant enough to look back on them objectively.
The War of the White Roses is an attempt to explain what happened in the bad times between 1968 and 1986 which were almost as important in framing the identity of the club as the many glory years preceding them. Other counties could have avoided much of the bitter in-fighting of the 1970s and 80s and settled into a gentle, humdrum existence but quietly making up the numbers is not what Yorkshire cricket stands for.
My aim is not to apportion blame, because I firmly believe almost everything those involved did during this period was in the belief it was the right thing for Yorkshire - even if to others at the time and those of us with the benefit of hindsight it is clear that was not always the case.
My interest in this period was really piqued in December 2013 by a book that had been gathering dust on my shelves for some time. My passion for Yorkshire cricket comes from my mum, but it was my dad who unwittingly set me on the path towards writing The War of the White Roses when he bought me a second-hand copy of David Bairstow s diary of Yorkshire s 1984 season.
Finally getting around to reading it made me interested to know more about the political upheaval Bairstow and his team-mates had to contend with.
It soon became apparent there was no definitive book on that period of Yorkshire s history written from a neutral perspective. There were some good ones from the viewpoint of those who, like Bairstow, were heavily (and in his case reluctantly) involved, and wider histories of the club or the game, or biographies of Boycott, which mentioned it. Perhaps it was hubris of my own, but I decided to write that book myself.
Now living outside the county, and having been born in it halfway through the period, gives me a certain distance which I hope makes for a fair account of a divisive period in the club s history. I have been touched by how many people have described it as such.
I would like to thank all those who have helped or encouraged me along the way, from my dad thinking of me when he came across Bairstow s diary in a second-hand bookstall to those who have spoken or written kindly of it after reading it, and too many in between to mention them all. If you were not already, just by reading you have become one of those people.
Special thanks must go to David Warner, widely regarded as the fairest journalist covering Yorkshire at that time, and now a vice-president of the club. The fascinating collection of cuttings he lent me was of great help and I hope to see them again one day in the club museum. The advice offered by David and the Yorkshire Post s excellent cricket correspondent Chris Waters, who wrote the foreword, and many others whose knowledge of Yorkshire County Cricket Club is far greater than mine will ever be has been gratefully received.
Thanks also to Paul Cunningham, Richard Neale and Rachel Wearmouth for reading drafts from their different perspectives and suggesting improvements, Mick Pope of Adelphi Archive and Penny Coleman of The Gazette in Middlesbrough for their help in obtaining photographs, and the team at Pitch Publishing for transforming it all into the book you are reading now. I am indebted to my employers, ncjMedia, for allowing me time to finish writing the book, and the staff at the British Library (the Boston Spa and London branches) and those in Leeds, Harrogate, Northallerton and Scarborough who helped as I ploughed through microfilm, microfiche and old newspapers in my research.
While others were understandably reticent, Jack Bond, Geoffrey Boycott, Matthew Caswell, Geoff Cook, Andrew Dalton, Sidney Fielden, David Hall, George Hepworth, Richard Hutton, Ashley Metcalfe, Martyn Moxon, Chris Old, Kevin Sharp, Jack Simmons, Bryan Stott, Julian Vallance, Alan Walker, Neil Whitaker, Mike Bore, Russell Devy and Ted Lester were kind enough to share their very different experiences of what, for many of them, was a difficult time. I hope I have represented their views fairly. Russell and Ted sadly died during the writing and since publication of the first edition, Mike - a warm and welcoming man who served the club on and off the field for many years - has also passed away. This paperback edition is dedicated to his memory.
I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Foreword by Chris Waters
T HE question I am asked most often in my position as Yorkshire Post cricket correspondent is, What do you do in the winter? If I had a pound for every time I d been asked that by a Yorkshire supporter since joining the paper in 2004, I d be writing these words from a villa in Barbados. I exaggerate, but the question is pertinent, for what does a Yorkshire Post cricket correspondent write about in the winter months? Fortunately, there is plenty of international cricket to monitor, while I am sometimes asked to help out with the football.
Between 1968 and 1986, however, the period covered in The War of the White Roses , there would have been no ne