Watching the Test Match this morning, and thinking about batting, run chases, and the like, I suddenly remembered something that happened to me while I was at school, which not only sums up my sporting ability, but also said much about my place in the social structure of Crossley & Porter.

One summer afternoon in the mid-80s, when I was about 12 or 13, the boys in my year were taken to the school's cricket pitch for a quick limited overs match, something like 10 overs a side. Being the second least sporty boy in my class (the least being Paul Meredith, who suffered from MS, and therefore exempt from most athletic disciplines), I was always going to be picked last. Which is fair enough. I couldn't bat, I couldn't bowl, I couldn't field. Still, one of the teams had to have me.

So our captain, having lost the toss and been put in to bat, decided to get rid of this useless player as quick as he could. Flying in the face of cricketing convention, which dictates one's strongest batsmen take the field first, I was sent out as half the opening pair. My captain's hope was that I'd get myself out in a couple of balls and then a real player could take my place. He just didn't want to risk his best batsmen against a new ball and their best bowlers.

But in a game where the object is to use the limited opportunity to build up as big a score as possible so your bowlers have something to defend, even now I can't see how that was ever supposed to work.

And it didn't.

The other team's bowlers knew that every ball I spent at the crease was a bonus for them. So they just bowled outside my off stump, while I played and missed.

Pretty soon the exasperation of my teammates began to show, and within a very short space of time they were calling on me to throw my wicket away. Obviously, I didn't want to let the team down, and such was the peer pressure, that it even got to the point where I tried hitting the stumps deliberately.

Of course, the PE teacher umpiring the match (I can't remember which: either Mr Fleming, an alcoholic whose thirst eventually killed him in his early fifties; or Mr Teggin, definitely ex-Army and none too bright, who once tried strangling me with my own rugby shirt) knew exactly what was going on, and quite reasonably refused to give me out when I was so blatantly trying to fix the game. Eventually, after eating ever further into our allotted overs, some (un?)lucky bowler on the other team managed to trap me leg before wicket, and I was finally out.

Having wasted so much of our time, though, we ended up scoring far fewer runs than we could have done, and it was little trouble for the other lads to chase our total and win.

Who got the blame? The divot who'd decided to reinvent the rules of cricket despite a century of international play saying otherwise? Nope. The sacrificial lamb that took its time about being slaughtered? Of course.

And that was considered normal.

Just one of the reasons my schooldays were not the best of my life.