Timing is everything in cricket, so I’m heading to the pavilion

Not really sure why anyone would be interested in my stories of playing at a village standard, thanks but no thanks, was the answer.

Two years ago I suggested to the sports editor (lovely bloke, coaches junior football), that he might want to take a column on my cricketing career...thanks, but no thanks, remained the answer. No one would be interested in my hapless attempts at failing to win, sporting glory.

A year ago, I suggested to the sports editor (lovely bloke, always gets his round in) that he might want a regular column from me on being a weekend cricketer.

He said yes. Actually, he probably said: “Fine, fine, go on then.”

I’m a journalist, a pragmatist. I know there was no sentiment in the relenting of the sports ed. There was a space on this page and I asked at the very moment the plans to fill it fell apart like my team’s batting line-up when three people drop out on a Saturday morning.

I was suddenly nervous – these pages are not really for the likes of me to share my cricketing non-abilities. You can read about Joe Root crafting another century, Adil Rashid ripping through a lower order, or you can read about me and my team bowling out Glusburn for 36...and failing to chase down the total. Why on earth would you have any interest in that?

Then I remembered the reason I asked every year if I could write a column about weekend cricketers of limited ability. It was because I knew I was not alone: clearly – there are 22 blokes on the field from two teams representing my club Airedale, every Saturday in the summer, playing against another 22 blokes. And there are about 13 teams in five divisions in the Craven League – even with my limited maths ability, I knew that added up to, erm, a lot.

But when I say I wasn’t alone, I mean I knew I wasn’t alone in a much wider sense. I know from the annual cricket tour I take to Devon with a BBC team (it’s complicated – my best mate plays for them and I’m their ‘ringer’) that there are men up and down the country in thrall to Mistress Cricket. There are an awful lot of us who have very little choice in the damaging relationship we have with the game.

A lot of us who probably can’t fathom why we go out onto the field for no apparent reward every Saturday. A lot of us who put ourselves in the firing line of the Other Half by insisting the lawn will get mown...in September. A lot of us who haven’t hit the ball off the square for 10 seasons, but turn up every weekend in the belief this could be the game where we crack the ball through cover for a perfectly driven four.

So I had faith in the fact that there are plenty of you out there, just like me, hapless and hopeful on the field.

And wouldn’t you know it, there were. Lots of you. My first column for these pages came at the beginning of last season. Last, glorious, season, the first in my memory, when we didn’t lose a single game to the weather. A season when my lads won almost every game and gained promotion.

Once that first column ran a lot of you got in touch to say that yes, you fully understood the pain of knowing exactly where you want your hands and legs to move in order to play the square cut, had played the shot in the nets a thousand times and yet every time you played the shot in the middle heard only the death rattle from behind you. You got in touch to say that like me, you’d read the books, know all the theory about a high front arm, a strong follow through, a cocked wrist at the moment of delivery – and yet your quicker ball went through at a pace that allowed the batsman to play about five different shots before it arrived in his vicinity.

It turns out I’d hit a nerve.

There are an awful lot of us out there who count time not in years, but in seasons, and I don’t mean autumn, spring and winter.

There was the season I played my first, proper, square cut (1994). The first time I moved into the top five of the batting line-up (1995) and, of course, my first ton (2010).

Now I remember the season I started my regular Sports Monday column on village cricket (2011) and the season I decided to step down (2012).

Why is this my last missive from the lower divisions of the Craven League?

After a fairly miserable season, I’ve decided to step down as skipper of my team. It’s been a frustrating, interesting year – and I mean ‘interesting’ in the Chinese curse use of that word.

I’ve reached that point, that happens every now and then, where I’ve started to wonder if there’s more to life than this. If having a whole weekend free in the summer might not be a bad thing at all.

Anyone who’s seen me bat will know that my timing is generally off, but every now and then it’s perfect.

I think my timing here’s pretty good.

Having shared with you two seasons worth of the highs and many, many lows of playing cricket on puddings of pitches, of dragging yourself to the far reaches of the county to amass precisely no runs, field at square leg and leaving the field in darkness and rain, it’s time to move on.

So thanks. Thanks for getting in touch and letting me know I’m not alone.

Thanks for reading and sharing my agonies and occasional ecstasies and thanks most of all for sharing in this mad, senseless, consumingly beautiful passion for the greatest activity ever created.

As the arts correspondent for the YP, my other great love is theatre.

So I’ll leave you with a quote from a far better writer than me who shared both these loves.

“I tend to think that cricket is the greatest thing that God created on earth. Certainly greater than sex, although sex isn’t too bad either,” Harold Pinter, 2008.