Gentlemen & Players

Meet Ben. His batting practice this afternoon was somewhat interrupted by a total stranger wandering onto the cricket pitch with a camera and asking to take a few action shots of him thwacking the ball into the nets. Thankfully, it turns out that Ben is a TV cameraman by trade - and also a very nice bloke - so I didn't end up with a bat-shaped dent in my head, but instead got to take a few rare sporting pictures (my only other experience of doing this being a marathon last October), and in the process had an amiable chat with Ben and his teammate Jim.

Somehow we managed to cover the trials and tribulations of attempting to earn a living as a writer (Jim suggested that as JK Rowling has recently published a crime novel under a pseudonym, I should step into the vacancy and publish under the name JK Rowling; I pointed out that my surroundings and subject matter are somewhat different to Rowling's, and that the market for Harry Potter and the Tipton Nail Bomber may therefore be limited). From there we got onto the perils of the sports beat for cameramen and photographers (Ben once covered a football match between Iraq and Kuwait at which the atmosphere could best be described as "antagonistic"), and it was after twenty minutes of swapping anecdotes that Jim asked if I'd like to pull on some whites and join a team of vicars to play against the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in approximately a quarter of an hour's time. This, I must tell you, is not something that happens to me every day of the week.

It turned out that Ben and Jim are part of the team for St Mary's Church in Selly Oak, and concerned that they might be light on numbers for the big showdown against the Second City's top tune-tootlers, I was increasingly looking like their very own Ashton Agar. If Ashton Agar was a bulky Black Country man disguised as a vicar.

As honoured as I was that anyone would consider me for any sporting endeavour - even when it involved fraudulently posing as a clergyman - I had to gently explain to Ben and Jim that the last time I played the gentleman's game was with an Ian Botham cricket set, in a nettle-choked Worcestershire field, at the age of nine. A well-placed beamer that connected with my skull that day was enough to persuade me that a white jumper and willow bat was not for me, and I had no intention of recanting that position so that my cranium could spend the afternoon as target practice for an angry flautist.

Luckily, there turned out to be enough vicars to go ahead with the game anyway, though I sensed Ben and Jim were a bit disappointed not to get me out in the middle and see if there was a century or two in me; England's great new cricketing hope discovered out of nowhere in the shadow of Edgbaston. Sorry fellas. For me, the Ashes will just have to wait.