It was said that when the teenage Boycott first heard of his call- up to Yorkshire by

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It was said that when the teenage Boycott first heard of his call- up to Yorkshire by way of a tannoy announcement during a Yorkshire league match, he promptly marched off the pitch saying "Right, I'm through with this sort of cricket now". Indeed he was, proving himself to be a master of concentration and technique on the international Test match circuit, returning immediately to the nets to iron out flaws whenever the unthinkable happened and he was dismissed. He was brought into the England Test team in 1964, after just two seasons in the Yorkshire side. And obviously, a slot on Blue Peter would be out of the question too.No wonder then that Boycott should have arrived in court with a bizarre collection of supporters and character witnesses, including several former lovers, the mother of his nine-year-old daughter and the king of tabloid publicists, Max Clifford. As a first XI, they were a fair representation of the ever-so-slightly barmy world in which Boycott has lived and played for most of his life.A prodigious accumulator of runs during his career, Boycott was a player who divided cricketing opinion between those who thought he was the greatest batsman of all-time - this was, not unnaturally, his own view - and those who saw him both as an utterly ruthless self-server and a disrupter of team morale, whether in the service of Yorkshire or England. Given that the cricket authorities have just sold the television rights to domestic Test matches to Channel 4, it is highly unlikely that a convicted batterer of women would stand much chance of a job on Britain's most politically correct television station. For if Boycott fails in his appeal against his conviction earlier this year, it is almost certain that his broadcasting opportunities in Britain will shrivel significantly. He was temporarily suspended from his role at the BBC as a Test match pundit after the French court's original verdict that he had beaten up the divorcee Mrs Moore, leaving her with two black eyes and severe facial bruising.

I mean, there he is, Yorkshire and England's greatest post-war batsman - statistically-speaking, anyroad - having to grovel before a French court, which, by heck, has got a lass as a judge, in order to try and prove that two years ago in a Riviera hotel he didn't belt his lover Margaret Moore in a row about money derived from a Shredded Wheat advert It's not cricket, is this. Boycott who reached 58 not out yesterday, would have been hoping to spend the next 42 years before his most important century, offering his services to the cricket broadcasters of the world, spouting on about the "corridor of uncertainty" outside a batsman's off-stump. But the uncertainty in his own career now resembles the width of the M62 motorway. Eventually she qualified as a barrister herself at the age of 69.".

He used to play on grass, did Geoff, but now a court in Grasse may well decide whether he has much of a career left at all It's a right pickle, really. Then she sued her lawyers and so on until she had got through six sets of lawyers. Many might have said was a bit nutty, but eventually she succeeded because she was right all along. "There is the notable case of Jean Carr, whom I took on at the request of the Law Society," says Geoff Bindman of Bindman & Partners."It began when she had been certified insane and she sued the hospital for negligence. In the process he accused the Archbishop of Canterbury of treason and the General Synod of heresy. Like many vexatious litigants his life resembles an endless quest for ever higher authority: "I will pursue this matter with every fibre of my being while there is mortal breath in my body, ad nauseam, ad infinitum, ad eternum," he said before announcing he was off to the European Court of Justice.The most disturbing thing about serial litigants is that just occasionally they are vindicated.