Yes, we triumphed in the Ashes! But that was 15 months ago.

Perth, Australia, is 8 hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, which isn’t anyone’s fault in particular, but when you’re following a sporting contest which starts at 10.30am local time, it plays havoc with your sleeping patterns. Last night I arrived home at about midnight, and suggested to cricket-friend Will via email that I might stay up to see if Flintoff and Pietersen could manage to hold out for half the day in the 3rd Test Match against Australia. Or maybe even three quarters of the day. Will, irritating pessimist that he is, doubted that they’d make it until lunchtime before being unceremoniously rolled over.

In the event, I fell asleep, only to awake at 4am with a burning curiosity to find out the score. I gingerly turned on the TV, to discover that Flintoff had raced to 50 not out. Not wanting to jinx anything, I turned the TV off, lay there for 10 minutes imagining an unlikely England victory, then turned the TV on again, driven by a second bout of burning curiosity. In that space of time we’d lost 3 wickets and were as good as finished. After the inevitable defeat just after lunch – Will isn’t just an irritating pessimist, he’s an accurate one – I then watched a good hour of post-match dissection, pondering what had gone wrong, as if “they are better than us” isn’t a perfectly satisfactory conclusion to come to.

I love cricket, you see. Pretty much every photo of me prior to the age of 10 has either a cricket bat, or a cricket ball, or a spreadeagled set of stumps in the background. My dad, a 6′6″ spin bowling giant, used to devastate sides the length and breadth of the Home Counties while playing for Redbourn or Dunstable during my childhood, and every weekend – on both Saturday and Sunday – the family would go along to witness the slaughter. That’s a lot of cricket. Even people whose criticism for cricket is accompanied by mouth-patting yawns and eye-rolling moans would have ended up developing some affection for the game after 16 years of enforced weekend attendance. I remember at school we’d have to write “What I did at the weekend” stories (obviously this wasn’t during preparation for Maths O-Level) and every Monday my story would be absolutely the same: “I watched my father decimate a village cricket side with nigglingly accurate offspin.” I think my teacher was worried that my home life was skewed rather unhealthily towards one particular activity. If I’d written “I watched television” every Monday, she’d probably have called social services.

This love of cricket led to a period of time where I actually played the game, and I reached some kind of level of achievement, despite being basically terrified of the hard, unyielding leather ball. I combatted this fear by choosing to be rarely on the receiving end of said ball, batting at number 11 and fielding in hedgerows adjoining the cricket ground. I was a pretty good swing bowler, though. I ended up playing for Bedfordshire Under 16s, and on one occasion was captured by a photographer for the Dunstable Gazette while bowling at former England cricket star Tim Robinson.

I gave up in the end, because the majority of men who play competitive team sports are basically idiots. I received unyielding stick for having an odd name and being interested in music – only girls and poofs like playing music, you see – and I found their depressing need to get monumentally pissed after each game rather tedious. (How times change.) But I’ll still sit up until six in the morning, absorbing the harsh reality of our national side’s defeat, and pondering selection policy. Old habits die hard.

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Which one’s yours, Lembit?