Taking a break from cricket

Whatever job we might do, and whatever rewards we work for, whether they be financial, ethical or sporting success, we all need the occasional holiday. No more so than the professional cricketer, the athlete performing in the glare of attention from the press and public, the lone individual in the team endeavour, forever just a few games away from career failure.

Last week Nick Compton, a batsman previously tipped as a future England star, put away his kit bag and announced an "indefinite break" from cricket.

I won't say I know how he feels, because I don't. My grandfather drove steam trains; Denis Compton scored hundreds at Lord's. I played a handful of games for Leicestershire CCC Under-17s, quickly realised I wasn't good enough to go any further, while Nick was burdened - if talent can be a burden - with both ability and a stellar family name to live up to from day one.

What we do have in common is a retreat from cricket.

From the moment I could walk, I had a bat in my hand. In the summer I hit balls in back gardens, school playgrounds and on the park. In the winter I netted or played against factory walls under streetlights. While other kids got chickenpox, I caught cricket fever. Aged 11 I joined Barkby United CC, and whenever I could, I rode my BMX to their beautiful hills and furrows ground, which had seven trees inside the boundary. When I made it into Leicestershire Schools aged 15, I remember looking at my fixture card and realising that with a combination of junior and senior cricket I had the whole month of July in whites.

It was cricket heaven. For that season and the next. And the next. Week in, week out. Then the same fixtures, the same away games against the same teams. The viscous sledging in the pressure cooker of senior league cricket. Making it into the Leicestershire side, and then being dropped from the Leicestershire side.

I can't remember the exact day I quit, but I was in my early twenties and my kit bag had been stolen from my girlfriend's house. Not that losing my favourite Duncan Fearnley was a reason to give up - I was barely using it, considering the form I was in. I quit because I was burnt out after years of non-stop cricket. Suddenly I felt bored on the pitch. And I'd found out that turning up to play still drunk after a night out clubbing didn't help me take wickets or score runs. I was dropped into the second team and didn't care.

For the next 12 years I never donned a pair of whites. I barely watched the game, either, which was good timing considering it was the 1990s, a decade, as historian Tom Holland wrote in the Guardian, "of unprecedented darkness and despair" for England cricket fans.

I'd fallen out of love with the game I'd spent most of life obsessed with. I had no kit, and I travelled for most of my twenties, living on a ship, or in the semi-cricketless nations of Japan and the USA. Although there were flings with ad hoc cricket, including a detailed living-room Test series with armchair fielders in an East London squat, and frenetic games on beaches and streets while backpacking through India, the formalities of the sport held no attraction.

Yet perhaps a return to cricket was inevitable. All those hours invested into the skills of such a complex game, and the memories formed on bus journeys to Grace Road to watch my heroes, or playing with my dad in the back garden, can hardly be erased.

Still, an indoor tennis school in Chiba, a city just downwind of the leaking Fukushima nuclear reactor, was the surprise venue to bring me back to cricket. I was researching my third novel, Tokyo, and was looking for a social sport to play that was easier on my body than rugby, and joined a thriving indoor league - more for the excuse to have a beer than to hit a ball.

And I did wonder if I was even capable of turning my arm over when asked to bowl. But I got it down to the other end at a decent pace and on a decent length. What made me realise the joy I was missing was the shot played. The opening bat for the Japan Ladies team stroked an immaculate straight drive into the netting. Style and technique. A moment of flow that I felt glad to be a part of, as if I were an actor in a performance rather than a competing foe.

Back in England I bought whites, a bat, and all the accoutrements that a fully fledged cricketer needs. I'd fallen back in love. I played league cricket, friendlies, and helped revive the Authors CC. Six years on, my resurgence continues. There might be days, trudging back to the pavilion after a bad decision or a low score, or playing in one of those matches where dropped catches skittle across the outfield, or I simply watch my best deliveries sail over the boundary rope, that I grumble and wonder at the point of standing in a field. Then a ball cannons from the middle of the bat - the bat that I'm holding. Or a leggie grips and takes the off stump, and the bails tinkle.

Form helps a cricketer enjoy the game. But enjoying the game helps form. I hope Compton feels invigorated by the holiday. I hope he knows nothing about the series played in his absence. I hope he forgets about the County Championship and the IPL and puts his kit bag in the garage and locks the door. And I hope he comes back to the sport he once must have loved.