Michael Simkins is in desperate need of some quiet coaching. In middle-age he still believes, despite what everyone tells him, that the England middle order might usefully benefit from his hard-earned skills. He’s also a man who thinks it is OK to get your wife to spend the whole of your wedding anniversary operating a scoreboard in what she describes as 'a meaningless encounter between pathetic no-hopers'. Even when scattering his own mother’s ashes his thoughts stray to another urn.

This is the hilarious story of one man’s lifelong obsession with cricket. From his earliest awkward days as a fat boy growing up in a Brighton sweetshop to his years running a team of dysfunctional inadequates still chasing the sweet spot, cricket has offered a shelter from life’s irksome realities and a place in which to quietly dream. That place is a peculiarly English arcadia of occasional wondrous beauty, forests of comforting statistics and the endless life-affirming rituals of defeat, humiliation and disappointment – the perfect net practice for life.