THOMAS had read somewhere that it's 22 yards between the wickets on a cricket pitch, but this was nowhere near that.

When he was Freddie Trueman bowling to the Aussie's Neil Harvey, he thought the gap between the wickets was the same as it was on the real pitch, but that was a long time ago when Thomas and his best pal Geoffrey spent their summers re-enacting Test matches on The Green, an oasis between rows of anonymous council houses. The Green had six trees of various species spread around it which, in their imagination, provided the perfect Test match arena for the boys.