Simkins - The last flannelled fool: my small part in English crickets demise and its large part in mine

Michael Simkins is the ultimate Sunday cricketer passionate, obsessive, technically inept, and hopelessly deluded. When an injury rules him out of an entire season, not only might it spell the end of his long career, he is faced more immediately with a summer aimlessly wandering garden centres and listening to The Archers.

He decides instead to set off on an odyssey across the counties of England in search of that golden time in his youth when his passion for the game was first kindled. Its a journey that begins in May in light drizzle at the birthplace of cricket, takes in the burial site of his favourite ground (now a Marks & Spencer) and even stops along the way to flirt with the love child of WG Grace and Kerry Katona that is Twenty20. It ends with the ultimate cricketing zenith returning to the field of play to bowl an over to Freddie Flintoff in fading light in front of a capacity crowd. So can cricket still bring comfort and meaning to his life or is Old Father Time about to call for Michaels bails?

Michael Simkins trained at RADA. He has appeared in more than 70 plays: stage highlights include A View from the Bridge at the National Theatre as well as the musicals Chicago and Mamma Mia. He also directed Alan Ayckbourn's Absent Friends at the Greenwich Theatre. He has made countless TV appearances recent credits include Foyle's War and My Family as well as turns on the silver screen in such films as Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy. He has worked with luminaries as diverse as Anthony Perkins, John Malkovich, Michael Gambon and Buster Merryfield. He lives with his actress wife Julia in London.

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This edition published 2011
First published in 2011 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing
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Copyright Michael Simkins 2011

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MCMXIV taken from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin the Estate of Philip Larkin and reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

A Room with a View quoted with kind permission of The Provost and Scholars of Kings College, Cambridge and The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of E. M. Forster

The Town Clerks Views John Betjeman by kind permission of the Estate of John Betjeman

Dreamers by Siegfried Sassoon Siegfried Sassoon by kind permission of the Estate of George Sassoon

Poem Harold Pinter from Various Voices by kind permission of the Harold Pinter Estate and Faber and Faber

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ISBN 9780091927547

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Then ye returned to your trinkets; then ye contented your souls

With the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals.

My thanks to everyone who has helped me, by accident or design, in the writing of this book, not least the wonderful writers on the game whose prose I mined: in particular, David Foot, David Frith, Gerald Brodribb, Stephen Chalke, Christopher Lee, John Barclay, Stephen Bates, Ian Jack, Alan Ross and the incomparable RC Robertson-Glasgow.

My special thanks to Andrew Goodfellow, James Gill, Mari Roberts, Liz Marvin, Rob Boddie, Peter Hayter, George Dobell, Duncan Steer, Andy Nash and, last but not least, my wife Julia. Certain names and locations have been changed. My apologies in advance to anyone who feels they should have got a referral to the third umpire.

Mr Simkins?

Yes?

Would you follow me in and remove your trousers please?

How often in my life have I fantasised about such a scenario as this? A smiling young woman in a nurses outfit, beckoning me into a curtained-off area. Yet now I was actually here, the reality was very different. Be careful what you wish for, is the moral, I suppose.

I followed her into a small consulting room and sat down heavily on a table covered with a length of paper towel.

Ill tell the consultant youre here. Shes just having a look at the results of your scan. Wont be a moment. She pulled the curtain behind her. I was alone.

I spent some minutes on the edge of the table, swinging my bare legs back and forth. God, were these things really mine? They looked much older. Like my dads legs, in fact. And what about those gnarled, camel-like appendages on the end? Had they really carried me successfully back and forth across the cricket pitches of southern England for fifty-three years? Now any similarity to feet, either living or dead, was entirely coincidental.

What on earth had happened? How had they and I gotten so old? One famous theatrical impresario with a special interest in finely-turned calves had once described the lower half of my torso as possibly the finest example hed ever witnessed in forty years of blundering unannounced into actors dressing rooms on first nights. Now look at them. Sagging muscles, mottled skin, kneecaps the size of small grapefruit; and was it my imagination, or was that the first sign of varicose veins threading their way up the side of my left thigh?

This is how middle age occurs, I suppose. It creeps up on you while youre looking the other way. One moment youre fine, just the odd niggle here and there, nothing that cant be cured with a quick squirt of Ralgex. You still back yourself to cover those twenty-two precious yards before cover point can pick up and throw. No problem.

Then suddenly you find injuries and afflictions that once came and went in a matter of weeks are outstaying their welcome. You have to get up to pee in the middle of the night where once you could make it through till John Humphrys. You find yourself deciding to wait for the next bus rather than sprint for the one pulling away ahead of you. And you darent stay up listening to the Test match coverage from overseas tours because you know if you dont get a full eight hours youll be utterly unfit for purpose the next morning. Before you know it you look in the mirror and realise youve turned from Andrew Strauss into Johann Strauss.