The romance of village cricket | Jack Marshall's column

There’s a toppled sightscreen to one end of the wicket, leaning as if drunk against a dry-stone wall, and at the other a run-of-the-mill community sports centre with metal stairs and a faint smell of pre-smoking ban cigarettes.

Pint of Boddingtons, £3. But the card machine takes a while to get going.

This is a quintessential English cricket club, and there are very few better places to be.

Having recently moved house, finally putting that bag-full of cricket gear to use as opposed to talking about doing it ‘one day, at some point, maybe soon’ was high on the to-do list, nestled between sorting the water bill and making sure my new TV was suitably enormous. No one wants to be the ‘all the gear no idea’ bloke.

There’s no team sport as ruthlessly individualistic, no collective athletic pursuit which can be so solitary, but there’s therapy in cricket. The hard numbers, the anachronistic and classically ‘village’ atmosphere. The scenery, pace, and nuance.

It’s a brilliant sport, maybe even the best: bowling the perfect ball or middling a shot is like tuning into a more crisp frequency on the radio of life.

Aware I was somewhat unlikely to emerge as some fully-formed Viv Richards at the drop of a Baggy Green, a new helmet was purchased.

Encouraged by the genuinely helpful girl on the till to try it on, there was nevertheless a reluctance to stick a full cricket helmet on my bonce in the middle of Sports Direct and look a proper numpty. But she was insistent. “Yep, good,” was all I could mumble as I wrenched it off so hastily that my mask almost pinged off across the shop like a burlesque dancer’s thong.

All the gear, no idea.

Net sessions have been a heady brew of sore muscles, childish frustration at not being immediately brilliant, and a realisation that I am quite unfit. But it has been utterly amazing and powerfully addictive.

First team training is 6.30pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Perhaps more realistically, the seconds are playing this weekend.