The art of fixing a Sunday game

Only a few weeks ago, at a village ground a hundred miles north of London, via a round journey that for most of my away team would total five hours, including tube, train and motorway transit, I conspired with the captain to fix a game.

Yes, this is a confession, of sorts. If I were a professional I might find the ICC anti-corruption SWAT team kicking down my door. But the world of weekend club cricket is a different animal. The gentle English Sunday fixture, where players might have argued with their wives for an afternoon on the pitch - there are certainly those among my own playing brethren who carefully negotiate between divorce and cricket - isn't to be wasted by bowling the opposition out for 50, or watching one of your team-mates rack up a double-hundred while the rest of the batsmen sit in their pads and mutter obscenities. Especially after a long drive into the wilds beyond Watford Gap, where "southerners", particularly those who live within the bubble of the M25, seem to think that venturing north in the UK is akin to embarking on a polar expedition.

This is friendly cricket, where the aim is a staged performance rather than a win. And not a show where one star bats and bowls a team to victory. There are no bonus points for demolishing the opposition - at least not when they are batting first - and only the players who prefer a pint of beer to a spell at the wicket want the game over before a queue forms at the bar. Unlike any other sport I can think of, opposing captains will come together and discuss how they can "make a game of it". They are choreographers rather than captains. In social cricket the show must be a chorus line rather than a grand soliloquy. Everyone has to do something to feel part of the performance, and the stratagems to get all involved require the cunning of a Test match general.

Therefore, in that game at the end of the motorway a few weeks ago, the opposition batting collapse was unwelcome improv. Each wicket we took received less and less applause, especially from the car-owning batsmen who were hoping for some sort of total to get stuck into and justify their petrol bill. So when the score was 60-odd for 7, with the change bowlers who'd been brought on to give away runs actually taking bloody wickets, I asked for a bowl.

Bowling to be hit rather than to hit the stumps, I discovered, isn't as easy as I'd thought. The game would be a farce if I lobbed up full tosses, so the delivery needed to look authentic yet be nothing more benign than a wide half-volley or a juicy long hop. I ended up going for two fours in the over, and found myself feeling pretty pleased with my efforts, apart from one horrifying moment when a ball that swung late threatened to bowl the batsman middle peg. He jammed the blade on it, fortunately, and I sighed with relief that my yorker didn't castle him.

Not that dross bowling guarantees runs. For the sake of raising money for a good cause I occasionally play in charity cricket games. These matches are an odd mix of ex pros and non-playing celebrities. One over, Devon Malcolm is tickling your chin with bouncers, and the next you're facing an actor and having to skip down the wicket to hockey-slap a ball that's dribbling towards third man. When my lift to one of these gala matches was from a TV presenter on the opposition, an athlete, I should note - in case he reads this and recognises himself - but not a coached cricketer, we made plans before he went out to bat how I should bowl at him. The first six balls would be: two wide of off stump to get a feel of the track, followed by two long hops and two half-volleys.

He left the first two, cracked the first long hop directly into midwicket's hands and was dropped. He hit the second long hop for four, and was bowled by the first half-volley. The plan sort of worked, I suppose, as I still got a lift home after the game.

The fact is that whatever you might try and do to "help" the batsmen to runs, the multiple ways available to be out in cricket are not on your side. As I found out that Sunday when we tried to be generous. A wide ball got dragged on, and then the ringer in our team got a full bunger creamed straight into his meaty palms at cover. He was too good to be dropping catches. The final wicket fell just as the opposition crawled over a hundred, when one of our very occasional bowlers took a diving caught and bowled. It was a brilliant pouch. On any other day he'd have been high-fived and feted. Instead he was sworn at. His defence for taking the wicket was, "I thought it was a bump ball." We scowled at him and slouched off the pitch as he failed to talk the umpire out of the decision.

We knocked off their total in half the allotted overs, and the game finished early, meaning many of us got home sooner than expected that Sunday evening. Time enough to help out with the housework, perhaps do some ironing. If we'd bowled badly better, we wouldn't have got back till midnight.