I’m no back-page philosopher, so why do I find sporting exploits so moving?

Ben Stokes plucked a moment of exceptional vigour out of our common fate of frailty

Ben Stokes celebrates his brilliant innings (Getty Images)

I happened to catch the cricketer Ben Stokes leaving the field with his bat held higher than Ajax’s sword after scoring in excess of 250 runs last week. Happened to catch him on television, that is. And didn’t so much “happen” to catch him as dash to the television, having got wind of his exploits. Well, not so much “got wind of” as heard about on Test Match Special, which I happened to have been listening to – all right, had made a point of listening to – all morning.

So who am I trying to fool here? Myself. I am in denial about sport. I refuse to accept that I watch it. I am not the kind of man who watches sport. Yes, I go to the odd Test Match at Lords when an MCC member has no one better to ask. Ditto football, though again I have to be invited by someone with a spare ticket. And yes again, I will watch an hour of darts, snooker, pool, tennis, table tennis, bowls, even badminton if someone has left the television on and the channel they’ve left it on happens to be Sky Sports, though I accept that no one in my house watches Sky Sports except me.

But I am not a sports fanatic. I wouldn’t dream of watching motor racing, cycling or golf – which aren’t truly sports anyway. I happen by, that’s what I’m trying to say. Take a glancing interest. Anything more would mark me out as … well, what?

I don’t know the word. I don’t know whether there is a word. Normal, maybe. A bloke. One of those dickhead dudes drooled over in the Ladbrokes ads as “the dreamers, the glory-seekers, the back-page philosophers, the Wednesday night warriors”.

I am not, reader, a Wednesday night warrior. I am a Saturday afternoon snoozer. And if it just happens to be the World Lacrosse On Ice Championships coming from Espoo, and I happen to have woken up, and I’m alone in the house, OK, I’ll have a gander.

Perhaps, if I grasped a few more of the fundamentals of the sports I do half-watch in the interstices of sleep and chair-dancing, I’d feel less of a fraud about claiming an interest in them. But I never did learn who is meant to play where on a football field, and cannot tell one footballer from another unless they’re very tall or very short.

And as for cricket, though I have dozed pleasantly in grounds all over this country and Australia, I still don’t get the difference between off-spin and leg-spin, can’t tell from just looking whether a bowler is fast, medium pace or a trundler, and have never yet seen a catch taken with the naked eye.

“What just happened?” I ask the person who has been good enough to take me along but who will assuredly never take me along again. “And who’s Aguero? Is he the tall one or the short one?” The answer, “Neither, that’s Shane Warne,” doesn’t help me.

Nonetheless, I had to see Ben Stokes hit the last of however many of his sixes before being stumped and walking off to tumultuous applause. And it would appear that part of what I wanted was the swell of emotion that I don’t normally experience until the thin lady sings the final aria of my favourite tubercular opera. The crowd rose, Stokes waved his bat, the sun beat down in Capetown, and I was close to tears. Explain that to me.

I don’t know Ben Stokes personally. I have never especially wanted to hit sixes against South Africa. And I am not, as a rule, stirred by statistics, impressive as these were. The fastest 250 ever hit by a red-headed batsman born in Christchurch who isn’t primarily a batsman on the second day of a second test while batting with another redhead whose father was an England wicket keeper anywhere. Unlikely to be bettered in the near future, I grant you, but not sufficient, surely, to bring a lump to the throat of a man my age who isn’t interested in cricket.

So what was it doing there? I have given it thought and believe I have an answer. More years ago than I can remember without once more dissolving into tears, I stood in school assembly in my new uniform and heard for the first time our school song being sung. I say “our” school song but in fact it was Harrow’s School Song: “Forty years on, when afar and asunder”.

How a massed choir of pustulate adolescents with furred up hands and filthy handkerchiefs in their pockets could make a sound so moving is one of the mysteries of music. It would seem any old brute can make it. But it was the words as much as the singing that got to me. The gross appeal to a nostalgia we had no right to feel yet – a forewarning of nostalgia, I suppose you could call it – asking us to imagine ourselves 40 years older, “feeble of foot and rheumatic of shoulder”, forgetfully remembering that “once we were strong”.

And then came the refrain – borne in, for Christ’s sake, on “echoes of dreamland” – “Follow up! Follow up! Follow up! Till the field ring again and again with the tramp of the twenty-two men”. Were those 22 men footballers or cricketers? I didn’t know and didn’t care. I was never going to be one of them, either way. They were the ghosts of a youth I hadn’t had yet, and I wept for it.

Later on, when I heard that boys weren’t singing “afar and asunder” but “a fart and a thunder”, I thought I would be cured, but I wasn’t. I won’t ever be proof against this song. It has nothing to do with sport. The 22 men can go hang. It’s about youth and age. I cried when I was young fearing what was to come, and I cry now that it has.

Ben Stokes plucked a moment of exceptional vigour out of our common fate of frailty. The crowd cheered what they’d lost or had never had. And I cried for my feeble foot, my rheumatic shoulder, and for never having belonged to the crowd.