How good is good?

A week with the cricketing Caesars...

You saw it didn’t, you? I know I did. Well, not all of it, obviously. Some of it. The end bit. I mean everyone did, didn’t they, a clip on twitter, or on the county stream, even on the ball-by-ball commentary that Cricinfo swapped over to once it got really big.

Louis Kimber, I’m talking about, the name on absolutely no-one’s lips until last week, when he scored 243 from 127 deliveries while batting at (checks scorecard) number eight for Leicestershire against Sussex at Hove. A guy who had hit 13 sixes in a first-class career of 30 matches hit another 21 of them here, mostly, it seemed, from the bowling of Ollie Robinson, who was having one of his 78-mph bouncer sort of days (and who can blame him?)

It was a heroic failure set in a quiet corner of England, carnage scrawled on a seaside postcard, a wish-you-were-here from the county game still capable of extraordinary ordinary things. I watched it on social media like pretty much everyone else, the ball almost invisible on the fixed camera as it was launched time and again by Kimber’s clipped swing of the bat. To connect that cleanly, that often was a small miracle in itself. “I was just trying to hit it as hard as I could,” Kimber said afterwards. He took his team from 175 for seven to 445 all out, 19 runs short of the win.

On Tuesday I went to Wormsley under more perfect home counties skies. I was the unused impact sub for my cricket team Authors CC, who were playing in a charity day for the Bob Willis Fund against a Matthew Hoggard XI. That kind of game is beyond my level now, as is any sort of T20 encounter – you may have missed the worldwide headlines when I announced my retirement from the format back in April after an innings at Stratford which became like one of those recurring nightmares where you see the ball but can’t hit it more than five yards. The Gods had spoken, and I listened.

This game turned out to be 25 overs a side and went down to the final ball, which was crunched majestically for six in a fitting end. The Hoggard XI had a couple of pros, and by pros I mean young lads playing as overseas professionals for league teams, in this case, Aston Rowant. We had one too, Liam, a South African here for the summer with Avebury CC.

Most league sides have an overseas of some description, being paid anything from hundreds of pounds per week at one end of the scale to maybe free accommodation and a part time job at the other. When they play in games like this one, they are better than (almost) everyone else, and deployed successfully, they’ll manage the match, getting a total up to something chaseable, bowling a few tight overs if the other lot are getting out of control, holding anything that’s hit to them in the field. After the Hoggard XI lost a few early wickets, their pros put on a hundred or so together very quickly to set up the game. The Wormsley outfield, which had seemed vast, suddenly looked much smaller when they began striking the ball.

Liam opened the batting in our innings. The Hoggard XI bowler, who was sending it down at a decent pace for our level, dropped one short. It exploded from the bat with a rifle-crack and soared way over the boundary, landing at the top of the steep bank in front of the pavilion. A ball or so later, he did it again. This one went even further. Matthew Hoggard was straight over to our benches.

‘What book has he written then?’

It was just different, a different sound, a different ball flight, a different degree of talent, immediately recognisable to everyone. Liam, like Louis Kimber, is 27 years old, and has a first-class hundred to his name. He got out at just the right time, caught by one of their pros on the boundary from the bowling of the other.

Cricket contains multitudes. Every weekend, players as good as Liam will turn out across the country, under their own kind of pressure, knowing they have to perform for the people that have invested something in them.

Louis Kimber got to leave his mark on the game. He is, by almost any measure, ridiculously good at cricket, better than 99 percent of people that play, and yet he bats at number eight for Leicestershire, in and out of the side, and at an age where decisions need to be made, an age where a future that seemed long-distance for most of his life has very much arrived.

The real lesson from this week is that cricket is big, and full of luck of both kinds. There’s a famous passage in Nick Hornby’s book Fever Pitch, about an Arsenal player called Gus Caesar. Gus became a figure of fun for the Arsenal crowd after a disastrous appearance in a League Cup Final against Luton Town, and yet, as Hornby wrote, he had started out as the best player in his street, then the best player in his school, and the best in the district. He got scouted by Arsenal and entered their age-group teams, where he was the best player in all of those. He got into the reserves and was too good for that level, so ultimately he made it into the Arsenal first team and appeared in a showpiece cup final.

He was making his way up a giant pyramid, and all the while others were falling away as he climbed, at first thousands of them, and then hundreds and then just ten or so others, all of whom had somehow made the same unlikely ascent to almost the same point.

You have to be pretty bloody good to get that far.