I had fallen for cricket, in my working-class part of north London, in very different times, the early Seventies, around the same time I fell for Enid Blyton’s adventure stories, Anthony Buckeridge’s prep school Jennings books, tales of Greek and Roman myths, and the elan-laden French rugby team (not, cricket apart, a black one amongst them). The game came courtesy of those two enablers to the thing-in-itself, those dual routes to access: watching and actually playing. My first fully remembered televisual season was 1975, and its standout image will be etched for just as long as Lewis’s interview: the inaugural World Cup final, Lord's, a muggy morning, and Roy Fredericks, the West Indies’ dashing left-hand blade, clad in a wide-brimmed white sunhat and white shirt open to the torso, hooking Australia’s demon bowler Dennis Lillee gloriously for six in an opening over, only to tread on his own stumps in the process. He departed to the roars of a crowd of every hue gathered on the grass beyond the boundary edge. A little later that same summer I remember waking up thrilled in my stomach, the way I always was when it was a cricket day, and turning on the telly to find, to my horror, that a group, protesting over the imprisonment of a man they believed innocent, had vandalised the Headingley test match pitch, and thus there would be no play that day. Ah, televised cricket, the time-honoured companion of the unemployed and of children, those without the means or the permission to pursue other pleasures.

Ours was an uncommon childhood, I grant you. We laboured, in the school holidays, under a strict academic regime supervised by my father. When he was out, at work, we’d convert our maths and latin primers into table tennis bats and a net across the table, or else play cricket in the hallway and outside. Our home backed onto a number of gardens, most of them overgrown, so you couldn’t play football in them, but a long stony strip ran alongside, just wide and flat enough to accommodate a bit of turn from the off for this apprentice spinner.

Cricket, then, was part of our route into normality, into mainstream Britishness, into the world outside our strange doors. We’d play it across the road on a neighbouring sidestreet or in the park, along and with other boys, and even at state junior school, with a tennis ball and the white wicket painted on the wall. We’d talk about Muhammad Ali and Bruce Lee, and know about show jumping and Harvey Smith (big on the box in those days), and play this game too. The big local park – Finsbury – always had a big people’s game going on in the summer – these were the days when urbanites, not so many, but some really did play cricket in the summer and football the rest of the time. Bizarre isn’t it, now, to imagine cricket as a way into the urban mainstream?