YORKSHIRE'S championship! I was nobbut a kid when they last did the trick in 1968 under the great Brian Close. Although I'm solidly Church of England - and a parson, to boot - I'd be tempted, if I ever had to go into hospital and they asked me what my religion is, to say: "Just put it down as cricket".

I saw my first game in 1954, the Roses Match on Whit Saturday. Headingley was full. Len Hutton opened the batting for Yorkshire and hit Brian Statham's first ball - a loosener - through extra cover for four. Len went on to make 44, his technique so graceful you would have thought it choreographed by Nijinsky. When he was out, there came from the huge crowd a long moan of despair like a winter gale in the chimney.

Vic Wilson, the farmer from Malton, made 80-odd and the red-haired Willie Watson 50. Before the end of the day, young Brian Close had whipped a thrilling 52 not out off the tiring Lancashire attack. The rest of the match was washed out.

In 1955, my grandparents took me to the Scarborough Festival. In those days, people felt they could safely leave a boy to his own devices without any fear of "strange men". Nanna and granddad handed me half a crown for my lunch and were giving me my instructions about where to meet them at six o'clock, when a stranger appeared and said: "I'm a member. I'll take him into the pavilion with me and look after him". There was I, an urchin from the back streets of Armley, Leeds - between the gas house and the jail - sitting in the members' pavilion with a toff. The cricket was out of the ordinary as well. Yorkshire were playing Nottinghamshire and Fred Trueman bagged a hat trick before lunch.

Like religion, cricket is full of words, and some of the best talking and writing of the last century was about cricket. John Arlott, commentating, was like a classical artist. He could paint for you the whole picture as you sat by the wireless. Arlott spoke in rich, metaphorical language and his phrases have stuck for two generations. For example, it was Arlott who coined the expression "indifferent light". You knew at once what he meant: not darkness exactly but darkness visible, so to speak. That phrase "indifferent light" is used these days by commentators whenever it gets gloomy and it looks as if the umpires might take the players off. Sometimes, one word would create a whole world. David Gower hit his first ball in test cricket for four. Listening to the wireless, you heard the smack of wood on leather. Then, from Arlott the one word: "Princely!" Back in the 1950s, a South African leg break bowler called "Tufty" Mann was bowling at the Middlesex batsman George Mann. The spinner tied him in knots. Arlott commented: "What we are watching here is a clear case of Mann's inhumanity to Mann."

Cricket matches provoke plenty of wit. Everybody remembers the commentator saying: "The bowler's Holding; the batsman's Willey". And traffic came to a standstill when Jonathan Agnew "Aggers" said: "Botham couldn't quite get his leg over". Ritchie Benaud gave us some wry moral advice last week when the ball rolled between Gilchrist's legs and went for four: "Ah, he didn't keep his legs together! A golden rule for life."

Published: Tuesday, August 28, 2001