For a sportsman with a severely stunted career peak, moments of intense pressure come few and far between. Those nine overs mentioned in the profile box to the top right sit squarely alongside playing in a six-a-side tournament against the manager and assistant manager of Exeter City, and one outrageously fortuitous hole-in-one on a pitch and putt course in Sidmouth nine years ago. Last Wednesday, then, elevated my sporting career to a platform t?hat, if not equal in stature to those mentioned above, contained far more potential for embarrassment.

This event was the annual Staff against First XI football match. Now, for a team of grown men against a group of thirteen-year-olds, there ought not to be too many physical impediments to competing. Glossing over the inches that I give away to a number of Year 8, I think it’s safe to say that, no holds barred, we would happily deliver a sound stuffing, having initiated proceedings with a montage of tackles from the Ashley Cole handbook. However, there are a rather large number of reasons that prohibit that sort of behaviour – so the fine line of measured competition, ensuring a close game, not injuring anyone, and not easing off to the extent wherein you look a tit, needs to be trodden.

A 25-yard free kick within five minutes of taking over custody of the staff goal wasn’t entirely within the best-case scenario planning, but I was both delighted and more than a little stunned to find myself pushing it out of the top left-hand corner with one hand. I’m the sort of goalkeeper whose mistakes are prone to being spectacular ones (see David James or Scott Carson), and the spectre of disaster, acted out in front of 200 children who’d like to see nothing more than a Maths teacher getting his angles completely wrong, was something that had been playing in my mind, even as the 1st XI strikers stood over the ball.

So why did I manage to pull off what is probably the best piece of goalkeeping of my (admittedly limited) career? Why did my goal kicking, which so often ends up skudding flat across the outer reaches of the six yard box, reach the halfway line and beyond, almost without exception. Why did it take the ball to ‘fall’ to a striker, eight yards out, for me to beaten. Why, two summers ago, did I enter the crease with 18 runs required off five balls in a six-a-side match, and somehow lead my side to victory? What is it about having 200 children intoning the well-known drone of ‘aaaaaoooohhh…’ as I approached a dead ball that actually made me focus?

I’ve read literature on high-pressure sporting situations that suggest that it’s tightly refined techniques that thrive under pressure, and loose ones that fall apart. Yet Daren Ganga has one of the most beautiful techniques in world cricket, and can’t score an International run. Is it simple techniques that succeed? Perhaps – but Lara and Chanderpaul were never straightforward, were they?

Perhaps it’s just understanding of exactly what you’ve got, who you are, what you want to achieve, and how you’re going to achieve that. Being at one with the situation, with the moment, the edge of the six-yard-box and the baying crowd. No consciousness of the individual ten-year-olds standing beside the left-hand post, dissecting each of your moves, nor of the identities of your targets or their obstacles: no focus on anything irrelevant to the immediate task. Maybe that’s what Ian Bell seemingly cannot achieve: the scenario grows to dominate the situation. I wonder what I would average in Test cricket if I had his ability. I wonder if he’d be teaching Prep School maths and writing for Cricket Web if he had mine.

I wonder if, given that chance, whether I’d swap?

In other news, I have this week been appointed as manager of Oxfordshire’s Under 10 squad for the 2008 season. I thoroughly look forward to experiencing another level of representative cricket for the first time. I wonder how difference it feels to know that the guy you desperately want to trip over his shoelaces on his way between the wickets has a Northamptonshire shirt on rather than one saying “Upottery”. Probably much the same…

I can find my way around increasingly large parts of the county without sat-nav (we’ll pass over the rather frightening incident on that roundabout on the A422 in Banbury), and I can hear the names of cricket clubs and villages without instantly thinking “where on earth’s that?” Charlton-on-Otmoor, for example, is now longer simply a place mentioned by Marcus Berkmann in Rain Men. It’s a place mentioned in one of those interminably long committee meetings, when you’re reduced to wondering quite why these things require three hours to discuss what could easily be done in a sixth of that time.

One thing I did discover in the course of said meeting, was that my club are planning to run a fantasy cricket competition for the season, based on its own players. I was, hence, most intrigued to discovered what I would be classified as, and how much it would cost to add Neil Pickup to a dream team… Turns out that I’m a “bowler”, and my value to any team would be two fantasy points. I think I was last selected for a side based on my bowling abilities in 2001. We shall see how that turns out once term ends in July and I actually get a go.

Another pleasing development is an increasing efficiency of coaching points. I’m getting a heck of a lot quicker in pinpointing the cause of an undesired effect, rather than flailing aimlessly at the effect. “You’re backing away” is now “your weight is too far back when you begin your shot with the result that you have to move your right foot backwards to keep balanced”. Being faster to find the root of the problem also means I’m faster to find a cure.

I wonder if, whether with an improved understanding of the game, there will come an improved understanding of my own game? There’s not much evidence from this week to either support or undermine this suggestion: I’ve bowled three or four overs of flat offies and played two straight drives off ten-year-olds. Time shall tell.

The highlight of the last seven days was Thursday’s trip to the County Ground in Bristol, home of Gloucestershire CCC, for a day’s workshops with current and former captains Jon Lewis and Chris Taylor. In the morning, we practiced “advanced fielding techniques – or, in other words, throwing ourselves around the Nevil Road Sports Hall in pursuit of bowling machine balls.

I’ve always been reasonably proud of my ability to throw myself in the way of moving objects: I’m pretty sure that 40 overs spent as the only fielder on boundary duty in a losing side speaks something for the fact that I can cover ground. It was interesting, however, to see the process of the diving stop being refined down into technical points and being taken through the reverse-chaining process to build up Chris Taylor’s interpretation of the technique. It was also intriguing to be the only volunteer who found diving to his left more straightforward than stopping things to his right.

I think that’s got something to do with six-a-side goalkeeping experiences, and facing right footed strikers hitting it at my left. There are differences in the technique, however (cricket, Taylor-wise at least, you’re looking at landing on your chest, and my goalkeeping leaves me on shoulders, backside and waist) – and the two skills are not quite transferable.

My sliding stops were less controlled, initially bulldozing a good six yards past the (stationary) ball as my “rudder” (also known as left arm) gave way, overwhelmed by the fact that I take more momentum into a slide than I thought I did (that or I didn’t take into account the differential in friction between gym mats and the boundary at Babbacombe CC in Torbay). Once I’d got that mastered, I then found a different way to screw up by attempting to stand up much too early and putting far too much weight over a bit of my left ankle that isn’t designed to take it.

I’ve spent the last three days wearing an ankle support that I discovered at the bottom of my cricket bag from the last time I shanked that particular muscle group. It’s not been right since I stood on the side of a pothole at St James’ Park, Exeter, while carrying a box of programmes on the night of the Man Utd replay – but I digress. The morning was enjoyable, and I learned a lot: enough to hold two full-length diving catches off an incrediball at this morning’s B&NO U11 session. There is value in having 11-year-olds think you’re good – it then takes less effort to make them listen to you!

After a Q&A session, Jon Lewis’ fast bowling workshop consisted of telling me quite a lot of what I already knew. It started off with my being the only coach present to answer “straight lines” to the question of what was the most important factor in the run-up (and bowling action). This was then the mantra of the session, and having completed Ian Pont’s ABSAT course in November, this wasn’t a revelation. It was useful as a refresher, to re-flag the points in my mind (particularly with regards to a bowler’s load-up, which I am now noticing massively more often), but it wasn’t mind-blowing.

Nor, for that matter, were my first sights of Cherwell’s U13 district setup, or my wide-net trials for the remaining places in the Colts B summer squad. Good-natured kids are one thing, but it’s entirely another to be able to bat… It’s season minus seven weeks (I think), and I still possess grave doubts about the stickability of our middle order. Or top order. Or tail.

Such is life. There is good sporting news to report, however – football seven a side: Dragon Staff 11, Summer Fields Staff 2. They are our big rivals, from less than a mile away in North Oxford, and we lost last year: so a result of that nature can’t be sniffed at. Nor could the look on my class’ faces when it was read out in assembly with the comment “… the headmaster’s place as number one goalkeeper may be under threat.” Priceless.

There hasn’t been too much happening in my cricketing world this week. I’ve survived an examination of short stuff in the indoor nets without being hit once – or backing away (I did get cleaned up, but that was a function of lacking talent rather than technique…) Focusing particularly on my top hand grip to make sure I don’t close the face at the moment.

The school boys are looking a little bit more coherent right now into the bargain: the batsmen are getting their front feet towards the pitch, the bowlers are hitting some decent lengths, and I’ve bought a few weeks’ quiet about my wicketkeeping by catching something stood up. We also had a sneak preview of the effectiveness of leg spinner’s double-bounce yorker – if only AB de Villiers had been there to take note…

Our current point of focus is on running between the wickets, and looking out for ‘manufactured’ singles by dropping and running. On the back of a one-day series where Alastair Cook and Phil Mustard seemed to be running a book on who could run the other out – not to mention the Ian Bell/Owais Shah yes-no-wait-sorry machine in the middle order, I have decided not to record anything from Sky Sports to show to the children as an example.

It can’t be that hard, can it, if you’ve been playing the game fifteen years – to judge what is a single, and what isn’t. Then there’s the other side of the coin, minted with England’s inability to hit the stumps, ever. Maybe we could practice them both together?

Anyhow, the clock’s ticking down, and next week’s looking much more interesting from a cricketing perspective. I’ll be making my way to the County Ground, Bristol, on Thursday for a “Fielding and Bowling Masterclass” with Gloucestershire’s Jon Lewis and Chris Taylor, and on Wednesday I get my first look at Cherwell District Under 13.

Right now, however?, I need to ?go and wander the grounds.

One of the best things about writing this blog is the fact that it’s genuinely useful as an outlet for what I’m thinking, and a base on which I can think and build upon. After that net session, I had no wish to put myself in the firing line again: but with a re-read, it was obvious that I must. If not for my own skills, for?? my credibility.

I can’t tell a nine-year-old to keep sticking at it if, at the first sign of danger, I run cowering into the corner. I don’t believe you can ever successfully persuade someone into willingly and consistently doing something that you can’t do regularly yourself. I know that, if I hadn’t have stood back on guard last weekend, the next time I did any work with a child finding back-foot/leg-stump play difficult, I would have had a nagging doubt at the back of my head – and nagging doubts manifest themselves as muddled thinking and bad explanations. There was no alternative.

Happily – both for my hopes of making any runs this summer, and my personal estimation of my ability to handle adversity, Sunday’s nets worked. A good 20-30 minutes of throwdowns aimed to spear up into my gloves, throat and helmet had the desired effect: (i) getting myself into line, and (ii) getting my head round a new slant on the age-old conundrum of backing-away.

In short, what I figured out – with the help of the guy chucking the ball at my face – was that my weight’s been over my backside for far too long. It’s all very well having a trigger movement back-and-across, but if it’s just your feet that move to middle-and-off, and your head remains rooted on leg, then your centre of gravity is only barely within your base. The slightest lean backwards, understandable as a short ball spears into your ribcage, leads to your centre of gravity being outside your base – forcing the feet to move to leg to compensate.

With a conscious effort to make sure my weight was initially over my front leg and front foot, the extra time I felt I had to play the throwdowns was incredible. The balls that I had previously fended away, porpoise-like, barely registered as any different to a delivery on off. Not only that, but I then hit three consecutive leg glances off the middle of the bat. As a rule, a full ball on my leg stump or outside it will either hit pad, or carry through to the keeper: this was new. And it was good. Now it’s down to me to keep it like that*.

*This sentence originally read “Now let’s see if it lasts”. However, I decided that was riddled with self-doubt and potential excuses, and as I’m not letting any of the kids get away with that, I’m not allowed either. You can hold me to that, readers.

There is no point in simply having the words: the actions that follow them through are a hundred fold more important – and this brings me neatly on to the second point of this week’s entry. Committees – or the managerial role in general. No grass roots sport would happen in this country without thousands upon thousands of hours’ work from volunteers: yet it always comes down to the same faces.

I’ve been at Bicester & North Oxford for less than three weeks. I’m now the Club’s Welfare Officer. Since 2002, at various times, I have been: (a) manager of two district representative age group sides, (b) manager of five club age group sides, (c) effective assistant manager of five more club age group sides, (d) webmaster for three different clubs, (e) communications officer, (f) 4th XI captain, fixture secretary and bloke-in-charge-of-teas. I have also filled in as umpire, scorer, unlocker, locker-upper, cover-repairer, chauffeur, first-aider, vice-captain, stand-in keeper and league fixture secretary.

I know am not alone in possessing a list of duties long enough to make anyone scroll down into the next paragraph. I also know that my list is nowhere near as long or as detailed as many others’. I’m not asking for plaudits: I’m asking why it is always the same people, taking on the jobs because they must be done – and no one else will do them. Why, at the end of a football match watched by 4,000, can only 30 spare fifteen minutes to help clean the place up? Why, when you ask who’s willing to take twenty overs with scorebook and pencil, is there only the same single volunteer?

One task. One team. One website. One stint for your club. At Exeter we had a saying – JFDI. Just Do It. Figure out the rest yourself.

Last weekend I had a net session that, as I pulled my helmet from my head, I described as being “about as much fun as being shot at”. Seeing (or failing to see) a cricket ball fizz through a space that was occupied, only a few hundredths of a second before, by your face, has the curious effect of making you wonder one thing: “why?”

So I back away to length balls, back-of-a-length balls and short of a length balls, as well as anything on middle stump or leg stump. That’s not news. It’s embarrassing, it’s pathetic, and it barely qualifies under even the vaguest, broadest definition of batsmanship, but it’s not new: and it’s not what this column’s about either. This column’s going to be about two conversations I’ve had in the past two weeks: one that evening, with a 1st XI player at Bicester, and one from earlier in the term, with a ten-year-old during school nets. The following transcripts may not be verbatim records.

Rewind to January 22…
Me: You batted well there. After what you’d said [“I’m really rubbish”] I wasn’t expecting anything like that.
Child: It wasn’t that good.
Me: You hit almost everything. I’ve seen plenty of batsmen who are much, much worse than that.
Child: But I play everything off the back foot…
Me: Stop looking for a downside to everything! You batted well.
Child: I’ve never thought of myself as a batsman – and the way I bowled today, I’m not much of a bowler, either.

Rewind to February 3…
Player: Did you enjoy that?
Me: No. Not the batting part at least. That was horrible. I was so far out of my depth.
Player: Are you sure? You seem like you’ve got a bit of a downer on yourself. You played some good shots.
Me: I’m fine if it’s full and outside my off stump. But anything else and I just get out the way. I was backing away at least one, two, three times, every ball.
(… short, irrelevant exchange as we established that I knew what I had to do, and was an experienced coach, I just couldn’t get myself to do it …)
Player: Don’t you find it a challenge?
Me: I do… just in there it was so far beyond my reach that it was, brutally honestly, nothing more than frightening.

We then proceed to, briefly, discuss which of the club’s four teams I would be out of my depth in, and the furthest I managed to argue him down to was between the 2nds and 3rds. Yes, I bowled well this evening: the ball found a line regularly and a length more often than not… but could I really play regular cricket in a team that isn’t bottom of its club ladder?

Why am I so utterly lacking in? confidence in my own?? game? Why I am so quick to lower myself into the position of that ten-year-old, a position I noticed and rallied against so recently? What is so wrong inside my head that it finds itself unable to follow even a single letter of its own advice?

There is something about cricket, I think, something about sheer isolation. It might be just you, facing a red leather missile without the tools to deal with it. It could be you, offering up hope rather than expectation: and fetching the long hop from deep midwicket. Ask Marcus Trescothick, Shaun Tait or Lou Vincent. With the coach’s hat on you are outside of that two-man bubble, your finger on another pulse and your eyes seeing “why”.

With bat and ball in hand, you never see the position of your back foot, your front arm, your backswing. You only experience the result: the frustration of the cowshot sending you over midwicket, or the cramp as you stumble away from the crease. The coach’s perspective is not an option: there is no time to explain or correct. There is simply defeat.

It is often said that the loneliest positi??on in sport is that of a goalkeeper, the moment after he concedes a soft goal. Yet the goalie has the knowledge that he is not facing the same treatment for the next five deliveries.

It is you against your opponent.
It is you against the system.
It is you against yourself.

Granted, I’m aware that 22 is a little young to be considering a self-penned memoir (unless, of course, you’ve played a handful of Tests, a smattering of ODIs and are getting someone else to turn your one-liners into entire paragraphs) – but bear with me, I’m not asking you to shell out ?16.99 for this at your local branch of Waterstone’s. I’m painting the background, and setting the scene for the season to come. I’m also silently smarting at having the “veteran” tag slapped upon me by site owner James Nixon last week, and feeling nostalgic enough for a re-run of my career highlights reel. Don’t blink.

Ever since seeing Graham Gooch bulldoze his way to 333 against India at the tender age of four, I’ve been hopelessly lost to the ways of our game. I’ve also been equally hopeless at maintaining any degree of dignity on the field of play of said sport. My first runs were scored, off an outside edge, at the age of 12 in an opening stand that spanned nine overs for as many runs. It was a Twenty20 match. The first shot that scored runs in the intended direction didn’t come until two summers (and four consecutive ducks) later, when I pulled a long hop to the fine leg boundary in an unbroken last-wicket stand of 40 in four overs. Needless to say, I spent most of them at the non-striker’s end.

With hindsight, it’s remarkable that I maintained any enthusiasm, let alone saw it swell. It’s also remarkbale that I was ever selected in a side as a specialist batsman again. My forte in my youth was floated leg-spin, a skill that deserted me in the two years between that aforementioned boundary and the next time I found my way onto a batting scorecard.

It was around about this time that my attention turned to coaching, and over successive winters I qualified as a Level I and L??evel II coach as I moved to Exeter University. It was then that being part of cricket, rather than simply watching it, truly became part of me. By the last of my four years in the South West, it became the defining act of the summer, and virtually every day fell to a domination of leather and willow.

Not only was I coaching and managing club and district representative sides, running up phone bills containing far more numbers that any list of batting aggregates, but I had finally discovered a niche in a side that I could fill – behind the stumps. It’s something I’ll certainly talk about again later (probably after the latest hopeful takes his turn on England’s gloveman merry-go-round), and it’s something that made me concentrate more on my batting. I began 2005 with 26 runs at a career batting average of 2.36, and finished 2007 with 263, at 6.58. It’s still not much, but do take into account the fact that I didn’t score any intentional runs until the age of 14.

2007, however, brought the end of the Devonian chapter of my life (the demographics of recruitment for primary school teachers are not something I intend to bore you with: it’s suffice to say that there were a good hundred applicants for each post). A Google search, a speculative e-mail and a return phone call later, I was on the path to Oxford: a story at its very beginning, and one that will unfold on the HTML of this blog.

A sto??r?y that, this very week, has a new subtitle: my search for a new club side is over. Bicester and North Oxford CC, of the Cherwell Cricket League, is the setting for 2008. The passing of the calendar has cured the January disease. Here comes the summer.

I’ve been living here five months now, since finding a school that not only was both willing to take me, but also one that I liked the feel of from the moment I set eyes on it for the first time. There’s also the small matter of free house and free food – but enough of my life story. There will be enough time for that when I’m spending summer Saturdays building sandbanks against the River Cherwell, hoping against hope that the clouds break and we get to see a handful of overs.

There is little point, after all, in making grand plans after the summer of 2007. Rain stopped play countless times across England, turning New Road, home of Worcestershire, into a swimming pool in the process, and forcing its occupants to decamp to Kidderminster. Not only that, but the echoes of the downpour against the roof of my school twice reached levels so deafening that I could no longer hear my own voice, never mind those ??of the ?children.

For someone whose wicketkeeping was described as being that of a “gobby little bloke in glasses”, that level of volume is some achievement. As of now, pessimism is the easiest insurance against disaster. I’m yet to meet a January whose first winter nets weren’t awash with a generous dose of reality – and the water that comes up around your ankles if you place so much as a toe on the sports field doesn’t help matters.

Having seen the range of potential batting on show to compile my summer charges, the Colts (Under-11) B team, however, rain might prove to be a palatable alternative. Perhaps my perception’s being skewed by a unfair comparison against the last guy I watched bat at close quarters. Unfortunately, the person in question was me, the venue the playback screen on my camcorder, and the performance suggestive of what Chris Martin might do if faced with Harold Larwood. The singer Chris Martin, at that.

But it’s only January. Last summer I bega?n my winter in trademark fashion, but somehow April found me being held responsible for one of the first lost balls of the year, having pitched one pull shot on the road outside the ground. Last s?ummer saw one 12-year-old begin the season losing his off stump every other over in club games, and end it with a crucial 40 for my district side on a two-paced pitch in the New Forest.

During the week, I found myself reading about Seasonal Affective Disorder, also known as Winter Sickness – a condition causing depression-like symptoms due to the lack of sunlight in the winter months. Perhaps this has got something to do with it. Perhaps it’s that I hadn’t picked up a bat in anger since tamely scooping to midwicket for 3 in mid-August against Woodbury. Yes, I do remember the fine detail of each dismissal. I can often remember each ball of an innings: these tasks can frequently prove to be one and the same, however.

Perhaps it’s not all bad. Perhaps I should be dwelling more on the Under-10 leg spinner whose action would pass as an imitation of Anil Kumble, were it not for his baffled exclamation of, “who?” when the idea was suggested. Or, perhaps, I should give more credence to the Under-9 who can bowl as quickly as any of the older children. Perhaps I should remember the way I latched onto a slog-sweep at the first possible opportunity, and the fact that a strip of rolled mud on the River Thames’ flood plain won’t have half the bounce of the Edgbaston indoor nets. Perhaps I should turn Mr Brightside up to full volume and remember that, five years ago, I had a patchwork of GCSEs ?and ?a batting average of 2.36.

The days are getting longer. I’m on the verge of finding a new club outside Oxford. My new wicketkeeping gloves are due to arrive next week. You can buy Creme Eggs in the High Street. Here’s to Summer.

Oh, for those of you wondering just why I picked that particular title, it was the closest I could get to combining the cricket field and my daytime home, the mathematics classroom (have a look here) whilst avoiding frightening people off with a mention of the m-word. That, and the other idea I came up with was Magic Numbers.