The North Yorkshire girlfriend of cricketer Geoff Boycott was this afternoon breaking the worst news of his life to him.

Rachael Swinglehurst and Geoff Boycott pictured together

Rachael Swinglehurst, 45, of Appleton Roebuck, had flown to France to hear whether the cricket legend had been cleared of assaulting his former mistress, Margaret Moore.

Judge Dominique Haumant-Daumas announced she had found Boycott guilty, and fined him just over £5,000 with a three month suspended sentence.

After hearing the verdict, Rachael was planning to ring the former Yorkshire and England batsman in Lahore where he is commentating on a key match between Pakistan and Australia to tell him the news.

Earlier, as she arrived wearing a smart red three-quarter length jacket and red jumper, she said: "If he is found guilty, he will definitely appeal and any sentence given would be lifted until he is found guilty by the highest court possible. We are all very hopeful though."

Ms Swinglehurst revealed the cricketer was currently "feeling ill" with a throat infection in Pakistan.

She said: "He is not well at all. I spoke to him last night and he has been feeling quite ill and he has seen a doctor. He is not at his best."

Rachael, the mother of Boycott's ten-year-old daughter Emma, who attends school in York, says that she is totally convinced of his innocence.

She told the Evening Press that, after knowing the cricketer for 24 years, most of them intimately, she simply knows with absolute certainty that he would never strike a woman.

"He wouldn't hit a woman," she said.

And she believes that the legal evidence she has helped compile also had established his innocence quite clearly.

Boycott was convicted in his absence earlier this year, at the Palais de Justice in Grasse, of assaulting Margaret Moore at the £1,000-a-night Hotel Du Cap, in Antibes on the French Riviera, in October 1996.

The divorced mother-of-two claimed he had hit her 20 times in the face, citing photographic evidence of two black eyes. But Boycott claimed her head had hit the ground when she had fallen during a struggle.

He failed to turn up in court after his lawyer had told him there would be an adjournment.

The verdict was set aside after Boycott demanded a re-trial, which proceeded last month. Rachael was one of 13 witnesses who gave evidence on his behalf. She told the court he had never been violent towards her.

She had helped compile evidence from several witnesses who said they had suffered two black eyes after falling and receiving a single blow to the side of their heads. Rachael says that the blood can track right across the face in such cases, making the injury look far worse than it is.

She said she began working with Boycott's lawyer Richard Knaggs to help clear the cricketer's name after her daughter Emma was upset by news coverage of her father's conviction earlier this year. "She was saying: 'Daddy is a criminal. It said so on the news,'" she said.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.