THERE IS SOMETHING almost autistic about cricket lovers. Not those who can actually play. Nor the Barmy Army types, whose main purpose at a match, it appears, is to tell fellow spectators in a beer-soaked caterwaul that everywhere they go, people want to know who they are and so on.

No, I mean those huddled masses who attend county games, wrapped up against the elements, with binoculars in one hand, sandwiches in the other and a scorebook and a couple of Wisdens on their laps. They worship the great god Owzat, whose priests are robed in white, and these supplicants mouth the creed, spraying crumbs as they do so: “Forty to get with two wickets left and seven overs remaining.”

The autism shines through in their obsession with statistics. They know the batting averages of their heroes better than their own bank details or their children’s birthdays. They can recall, with little persuasion, how many wickets any bowler took in a season and how many were left-handers.

Michael Simkins is one such cricket tragic. In this hilarious memoir, subtitled How Cricket Saved My Life (Then Ruined It), he describes the moment when, as a fat unmotivated child, he discovered Colin Milburn, the rotund England batsman. Determined to emulate his hero, Simkins tries to get into the school team but is just not very good. He does make a hundred at the Oval, but in the car park against two even less coordinated schoolmates, with the innings abandoned when he hits the ball under Pat Pocock’s car.

As an adult, Simkins creates a team of misfits whose only purpose is to find people even weaker than them to play. Possible opponents are dismissed if they don’t sounds asthmatic or alcoholic on the telephone. Simkins’s wife soldiers on, making the teas and judging her husband’s mood for the weekend via the weather reports.

The most touching scenes are of Simkins the child, playing cricket in his father’s sweet-shop in Brighton, spending his holidays at the county ground in Hove trying to get autographs or constructing an entire season’s county championship under his bed with a dice game. It brought back memories of another rather sad child who devised a complicated set of rules based on my calculator’s random number generator so that I could play cricket during maths lessons.

While supposed to be performing quadratic equations, I was instead playing a Test series between a Schoolteachers’ XI and a team made up of characters in Piers Anthony’s Xanth novels. Or between the 1989 Australians and Religious World Leaders. As I recall, Mother Teresa was a demon fast bowler. Similar tragic children will empathise with Simkins’s wonderful antihero.

Ebury, £10.99; 320pp £9.89 (free p&p) 0870 1608080 timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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