Nick Ahad: We’re bonded by copybook tales from the village cricket greens

As a kid, I grew up in a corner shop, an old-fashioned family business where the four children took turns in serving customers while mum was making tea or bathing one of the younger of the Ahad clan. As the eldest, it generally fell to me to serve in the shop later at night while my sisters were being put to bed –trusted to be responsible enough to look after the cash coming over the counter.

Being given such a charge at such a young age is probably why, one day, when a load of change was found in my sock drawer, my mum put two and two together and decided I’d been sticking my hand in the till.

I was duly grounded (mum was quite the judge, jury and executioner) but to this day I still maintain I do not know where that money came from.

I hope you believe me, because I’m about to make another confession that, I promise with all my heart, is entirely true – but is going to seem unlikely.

I have never read Marcus Berkmann’s Rain Men.

Well, until the other week.

I have a very old friend, Del, one of the group with whom I discovered the beautiful, noble game of cricket.

These days he lives in the Midlands and so we only see each other sporadically and two things always happen when I head to his house for a weekend.

The first is lots of arguing over lots of drinks about Wasim, Waqar and Robin Smith in the heady summer series of 1992 when we both discovered the truly beautiful game.

The second thing is that I attempt to read Marcus Berkmann’s Rain Men – and I invariably get to about the fourth page before falling asleep (as a result of the many drinks imbibed while reminiscing about the summer we were first gripped by the game).

So it was only two weeks ago, after a visit to Del’s, that I remembered, finally, to borrow his copy of Rain Men.

And it was only a couple of days after getting back that I felt that same feeling of dread that I felt all those years ago when mum found a load of change in my sock drawer and assumed I had supposedly pilfered it out of the till.

If I didn’t know me and I had been reading my columns about local cricket this summer, I would assume that here, indeed, was a chap lifting from that book.

For those that do not know, Berkmann’s book is a beautifully written paean to those who play cricket with a great deal more enthusiasm than talent. Rain Men tells the tale of a man whose top score, in his entire career, is nine – and who manages to be one of his team’s recognised batsmen.

It tells the tale of a team who play for the sheer love of the game – because trying to play for anything else (like wins, pride, trophies) would be fruitless.

Reading each chapter was a wonderful and awful experience all at once because, as much as I recognised and enjoyed the tales he was telling, I recognised some of them a little too closely.

Passages about the ineptitude of fellow players, of terrible time-keeping, of people turning up at wrong grounds and of interminable committee meetings felt all too familiar. They read an awful lot like some of my own cricket columns I have penned for these pages.

Whole chapters – particularly one on the weather and one on the ‘beauty’ of umpires – mirrored exactly what I have written about this summer while relating to you tales of my own fair Airedale Cricket Club.

So why had not Del and all my other brothers in white thought to warn me that my own columns might look a little like plagiarism? It appears many of my cricket comrades are not as unacquainted with lying as me and when they said they’d ‘enjoyed my latest column’ what they actually meant was ‘I probably will enjoy them when I get round to reading them’.

How had I missed this? I’m a reader, I like cricket. I surveyed my bookshelves. I appear to favour biographies, which is why I had missed this.

A quick visit to website Amazon has now filled the gap in my cricket reading. Fatty Batter by Michael Simkins is on order, but it was Gideon Haigh’s Many a Slip (A Diary of a Club Cricket Season) which arrived last week that assuaged my concerns that you lot might think my columns are simply copied from Berkmann’s book.

Haigh, generally recognised as the greatest living cricket writer working today (and I’m not even going to make a joke about present company excepted – he really is that good) also has a lot of similarities with Berkmann.

Reading Haigh, it occurred to me: we are not all copying from each other. The reason my columns bear more than a passing resemblance to the work of others is the same reason it has resonated with a number of YP readers. We are a certain breed, us weekend cricketers. Us brave, noble, crackers blokes who come together every summer in celebration of the greatest pastime ever invented. The same things preoccupy us all – weather, men in white coats, length of grass on a pitch, the desperate terror of getting out to the dibbly dobbler who appears to magic wickets out of nowhere. These common pre-occupations are what bind us – myself, Berkmann, Haigh – in the shared brotherhood of weekend cricketers.

Which is why pre-occupations of Haigh and Berkmann mirror so closely my own.

Reader, I did not copy them.