Dennis Amiss - Search party

Thirty years ago, Dennis Amiss published an autobiography entitled In Search of Runs. Australian readers would have queried the use of the plural: In Search of Run might have seemed a fairer reflection of his form.

The book had clearly been commissioned on the basis of Amiss's 1974, when his 1379 runs at 69 had just failed to break Bob Simpson's decade-old record for Test runs in a calendar year. It had reckoned without Amiss's 1975, including 19 runs from his last seven Ashes innings during which he had personified the crumbling of the English bulwark in the face of Australian pace. At my primary school in county Victoria, he was known, rather cruelly, as "Dennis, A Miss".

Seldom can a batsman of international quality have been reduced to such helplessness. "Many a time I walked out to the middle in a Test match knowing it was virtually a waste of time carrying a bat," Amiss said of facing Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson. "I knew it would not so much be used to make strokes as to fend the ball off my body." In hindsight, he reflected, it might have been wiser to stand down before the selectors did the standing. In the end, though, failing was the simpler option. "It takes a certain moral courage for a man to stand up and admit that he is not mentally and physically equipped to play for his country at Test cricket," he recalls. "Looking back, I can see that I was not brave enough to ask to be omitted from the England team. Conscience does indeed make cowards of us all."

The last line is a remembered snatch of Hamlet's `To be or not to be': the Dane's soliliquoy on suicide, whose attractions are weighed against the dread of `the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns'. Unusually for a sports book, it is perfectly chosen, for Amiss's choice was also Hamlet's: "Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all/And thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." And the line actually fits quite tightly with the totality of his story.

Amiss was a slow-ripening cricketer, who took five years to win his county cap for Warwickshire, then five years to make his first Test half century, being "completely overawed" and "horribly nervous" at the top level. His choleric county coach `Tiger' Smith "more than once...reduced me to tears"; he was left "near to tears" by a pair against Australia at Old Trafford in 1968 and a hostile reception from the crowd.

Amiss did not play his cricket in a tight-lipped fury or with a triumphal hauteur. He was a walker throughout his career, even once in a Test against India where he thought he merely might have hit the ball and left because it was "such a loud, confident appeal"; his partner Alan Knott told him afterwards he'd been nowhere near it. It is of a piece with a suggestible personality: on one occasion, he was hypnotized over the phone while padded up waiting to go in during a Test match against Pakistan.

There is even something slightly apologetic in the title of his book. `Searching' for runs? The impression was of someone peering round the corner hoping to find a few that someone else had discarded - not altogether inappropriate given his recent travails, as observed, but on the meek side even by the standard of the times. That summer, Fred Trueman published Ball of Fire, Derek Underwood Beating the Bat, John Snow Cricket Rebel and Mike Procter Cricket Buccaneer - but here was polite, popular, pipe-smoking Amiss foraging furtively for a run or two, if nobody minded, and it wasn't too much of a bother.

Yet Amiss was not too nice a guy to succeed. Against opposition other than Australia, Amiss's simple technique and cast-iron concentration made him for several years England's most formidable batsman. His record ex his Ashes Tests is 3307 runs at 57, and he was the last English-born batsman to reach a hundred first-class hundreds until Graham Gooch's equivalent landmark. Something clearly clicked in Amiss's career that made him capable of double hundreds against strong West Indian sides at home and away, and marathon innings against the best slow bowlers in the world in India. And that, I suspect, might have been Geoff Boycott.

The penultimate chapter of In Search of Runs, `A Man Called Boycott', reminds the reader what an enigma the Yorkshireman was to the public, and even his teammates, at the height of his career. Amiss opens with a vivid memoir of their first partnership, in a Prudential Trophy match at Old Trafford in August 1972.

`Good luck,' said Amiss as they walked out. No reply: he learned later that Boycott did not approve of such a comment in a game of skill. Boycott burst through the gate first, forcing his junior partner to jog after him, which was also a habit: a picture shows the great man brandishing his bat and surveying the field well ahead of a shyly-smiling Amiss. In the middle, Boycott said nothing, and it would be some time before he did. Calling? Watch and learn.

When next they opened together at Trent Bridge in June 1973, however, Amiss had the nerve to call - and, even worse, the nerve to countermand a call. Reconsidering a second, Amiss sent Boycott back. Boycott kept coming. Amiss buried him: "I turned my back on him and, as you can imagine, he said a few well-chosen words as he walked past." He then compounded the offence by making a fluent hundred, his first at home.

The story goes that, head swathed in a towel, Boycott saw not a ball of Amiss's unbeaten 138, and wailed self-pityingly when the landmark was reached: "Stop it! Stop it! They're my roons yer clappin'!" The one-way feud continued afterwards: Boycott refused to speak to Amiss, claimed that his partner had run him out on purpose, and threatened to turn the tables when next they batted. It took captain Ray Illingworth to broker a settlement, pulling Boycott aside at the dinner before the next Test and telling him: "Dennis has apologised. Now you stay here and sort this out, otherwise you'll never play for England again while I'm captain." And there it did end. Amiss, by his own account, came to relish opening with Boycott: so sure, so correct, so tough.

These days the story of that Trent Bridge run out is part of the bulging official Boycott-As-Selfish-Bastard File: it's aired again in Leo McKinstry's excellent Boycott (2000). Yet the implications for Amiss were also profound: perhaps even the making of him at Test level. This most retiring of cricketers had asserted himself in the presence of the most forthright; he had demonstrated he was not a pushover, in his own eyes and those of others; he had proved that conscience need not make one a coward all the time.

Everyone deplores the cricketing egotist, but the challenges such personalities pose to other egos can be the making of them. Phil Edmonds, for instance, relished Boycott's prickly personality, how in the nets he would seize on loose deliveries and leer: "Anoother fower!" It put Edmonds, to use Mike Brearley's phrase, "in touch with his combative powers". The statistical evidence suggests that the same was true of Amiss.

When he first batted with Boycott, his Test average was less than 20. In the dozen Tests they played together, his average was 66. In the two Ashes series from which Boycott then abdicated, his average dwindled to less than 15. It is not the whole story of Amiss's career, for when he published his autobiography 30 years ago he was also on the brink of an astonishing comeback at the Oval with next to no assistance. But it is, I think, a part of the story, because cricket is not simply the search for runs and wickets, but for the environments, the conditions and the comrades that best suit our getting them.