We won at the P Sara

It's all about the team.

That's the key thing to remember. It's all about the team. And we won a game. For only the second time ever overseas, the Authors won. Actually we won two games, although, for annoying work-related reasons I came home before the second one.

It was, in that sense, our most successful tour ever. We went to Sri Lanka, played five games in heat and humidity that felt ferocious but we were told was gentle, won two of them, acquitted ourselves honourably in the others. We continued our sponsorship of the gifted young Pathum Nissanka, who is now a Sri Lanka Under-19 batsman, and began sponsoring the enormously gifted Lihini Apsara, who plays for the women's U-19 side. We saw the pitch we provided for Amarasuriya College two years ago, gave them the proceeds of a quiz run in conjunction with The Nightwatchman to buy further equipment and then lost to both their present team and their Old Boys side. It's about more than the team: it's about the wider community of cricket.

But it's also about less than the team. It's also about the individual. What did I do? Did I achieve feats that will live in the legend of the club? Did I help? Did I, to use the quasi-mystical phrase skewered by Martin Amis in London Fields, justify my selection?

I left the tour with three cricketing memories. There was a firm push through midwicket for the only two runs I scored, almost certainly the most professional looking leg-side shot I've ever played. There was my premature celebration of my one wicket on tour, standing arms aloft and watching in horror as the novelist Sebastian Faulks turned a simple catch into an excellent one by juggling it on his belly. And there was the moment at the P Sara Oval, fielding at short midwicket, when I threw myself up, reached back with my right hand and cleanly took an awkwardly looping bump ball before a collapse and controlled roll - a rare act of athleticism on a tour in which I felt my age like never before. Given how that game, against Tamil Union, eventually panned out, perhaps I could even kid myself that the run or two it saved was crucial.

We batted first and, thanks to a half-century from the historian James "Biggles" Holland, in an outstanding second-wicket partnership with Sebastian, got into a good position before a familiar collapse. Tony McGowan, a former Yorkshire altar boy of the year turned young-adult novelist, hit three consecutive boundaries as the middle order and tail eked the total to 182 off our 35 overs. (Me? Well, it's very kind you should ask, but I smacked my first ball straight to square leg).

Two years ago we had almost defended 135 on the same ground against the same opposition, so, as news broke of David Bowie's death and we congratulated ourselves on the fact that, unlike in our first game, nobody was actually throwing up at lunch, there was a sense we could perhaps do it.

What we needed was early wickets and our opening pair delivered. Ed Bugge, an aspiring novelist and former goalkeeper in the Zambian second division, and our skipper Charlie Campbell picked up three wickets each. The historian Tom Holland, elbows clanking like a thin, academic Marouane Fellaini, picked up another, the Lion of Rajasthan roaring in Colombo. They were seven down and still needed more than 100.

They began to rebuild. They had time. The heat became more oppressive. I bowled an over but, exhausted, I struggled to get my arm high enough and conceded nine. Shehan Karunatilaka, who wrote the great cricket novel Chinaman, also struggled to find an instant rhythm. It began to feel as though they were cruising.

A dab ran through the vacant third slip. From point I chased it, tight hip stiff and sore. At the last I lunged, got a palm on the ball and then, almost instantaneously, felt the boundary rope on the back of my hand, flipped over onto my knees and signalled four. It felt like that would be emblematic of the game: an agonising effort that fell just short.

But then they slowed. Nicholas Hogg, another Cordon contributor, fizzed an offbreak into off stump. In the penultimate over, another wicket, stumped off Nightwatchman editor Matt Thacker.

They needed three off the last over, bowled by Biggles. We needed a wicket. A scuttled single. The No. 11 on strike. Chipped towards Matt at cover. He plunged forwards, arms outstretched, got hands to the ball and… dropped it. But the non-striker, 70-odd not out, had set off. The No. 11 remained frozen. Matt, on his knees, managed to ignore a cacophony of incoherent shouts and threw to Biggles, who whipped off the bails.

Improbably, farcically, we'd won. Not in the swinging cool of the hills in Nuwara Eliya as we had two years earlier, but in the furnace of a Test ground on the coast, when conditions were very much against us.

We celebrated at the bar owned by Tillakaratne Dilshan. People don't go there for the food, we were told. Given they recently lost their liquor licence, that's a pretty major drawback. Within 20 minutes we had finished off the two bottles of champagne and the handful of lagers they had left in the fridge and they'd sent out to a local offie for more. Some of the photos were nice, though.

But amid the euphoria, there was a shadow. We had won and, of course, it's all about the team, but my contribution had been a first-ball duck, a rank over that should have cost more than the nine runs it did, and some fielding that occasionally attained the heights of adequacy. I was Ian Salisbury in Karachi in 2000, only without the 20 runs: the wallflower at the orgy. It's all about the team, but what if the team is better off without me?

On the other hand, I had been (an integral) part of the team that had won that Nightwatchman quiz. I may be crap at cricket but when it comes to trivia, I habitually justify my selection. And that, in a very literal sense, is the real quiz.