The travails of a middle-aged cricketer

I was called "middle-aged" this week.

I am middle-aged, both temporally and temperamentally, so I can't really complain. (I'm 39 but suspect I haven't yet reached my natural age, the age I was born to be. I played earlier this summer for the Times Over-40s, qualifying on residency.) Still, there are certain truths it's better not to have thrust straight at you.

"How," she asked, "do you as a middle-class, middle-aged white male find covering women's sport?" I realise that could sound aggressive but it was a perfectly reasonable question in the context of our ongoing discussion. Still, it stung. Middle-aged? Me? What made it worse was that we'd just spent the day playing cricket for the same side. She'd seen me at my athletic best: swooping to my left to intercept a ball at short fine leg; a heroic slide and pick-up on a wet outfield to keep a possible two to a one; bowling five really quite sprightly overs.

Then I thought about it. The interception had been followed by a pathetic underarm throw because my shoulder seized up. After the slide and pick-up I spent the next ten minutes surreptitiously massaging my wrist, which hasn't been right since a minor car crash in Chile in the summer. The five overs were of the dibbly-dobbliest offspin. She'd also seen that it took 20 minutes of rolling on a foam cylinder even to get me onto the pitch. She didn't have to be a proper cricketer in her twenties to see me as a creaking old man.

At the time I feigned faux outrage and insisted I was in "late youth", but this morning, when the alarm went, my back was so stiff and tight that I couldn't roll over to turn the buzzer off, instead having to shuffle over on my elbows. I felt exhausted, glutes and hamstrings throbbing, shoulders and back one solid block. And I needed more sleep. I swigged from a bottle of Lithuanian fish oil sold to me by one of the instructors at the gym. I find it hard to believe I could be any less flexible if I stopped taking it, but I dare not take the risk.

I can't remember the last time I got more than six hours sleep in a night. On this day I could have stayed in bed four hours longer - although by then my back would probably have seized up completely - and gone to cover Chelsea losing against Crystal Palace; that is, done my job, made money and seen a game of some importance in the emerging narrative of another third-season Jose Mourinho disintegration. Instead, I was picked up in a local petrol station and headed out to play cricket in Oxfordshire. I knew I'd get back late, and then there would be another aborted sleep before getting up early to go to report on Swansea v Manchester United. And there was a rail strike, which meant going by car and getting up even earlier.

And this for a game I'm not even good at. My batting this year has been atrocious. It's true that once I've got past 5 I haven't been out, but that has only happened twice (a 26 not out at the Brabourne in Mumbai and a 23 not out at Coldharbour near Dorking). The rest of the time I've spent chipping the ball tamely to fielders. If it weren't for a swept four at Eton I'd have dropped more catches this summer than scored runs for my main team, the Authors (I've taken 50% more wickets for them than I've scored runs).

It's true that six of my eight drops this year have involved dives, and that the other two were hit pretty hard, that one of them came through the sun, that one was with a distracting line of trees in the background, that one was when sub-fielding for the opposition, when I wasn't really concentrating, and that I took one of them, before stumbling in a pothole, falling backwards and being knocked briefly unconscious - but still, I'd quite like to take something that isn't off my own bowling.

I did take a catch at Ascott House - a dolly, running to my left from square leg - against the Church of England, which I thought had won the game. Unfortunately there had been a belated call of no-ball and they ran a single on my celebration.

Have my eyes gone? Or have I just been unlucky? I can't quite work it out. Equally I can't work out whether going to the gym is helping or hindering my cricket. I pretty much ache all the time, but maybe I'd be even worse off if I didn't exercise. And all for what? To sit like Canute on the beach and fruitlessly attempt to hold back the tide of time?

That's the problem when you hit middle-age - you wonder if each game might be your last. It's only a year since I retired from hockey and already the cycle seems to be repeating in cricket, a game I thought would sustain me at least another decade. A month ago I had a day when I could barely pitch it, got carted all over and wondered if that was it. I ended up running 6km round the playing fields after we finished, so I wouldn't have to talk to anybody in the dressing room. Which is absurd: I know I'm no good at this game and never have been.

I've played four matches since, and scored 0 (chipped to midwicket) and 1 (chipped back to the bowler). But my bowling, for no obvious reason, has clicked. Over those four games I've bowled 22-2-72-4. On Saturday I finished off with a double-wicket maiden. But at the back of my mind I know that the way I'm bowling screams out "old-man offie": I'm nagging not turning.

Even on the good days, I feel mortality lurking at my shoulder.