I was batting in the Ashes... with my hero

I WAS a fortnight away from my 16th birthday when the fabled 2005 Ashes series ended. My hero-worship throughout it belonged to Ian Bell — though I don’t think I’ve ever made that abundantly clear to him.

He was the baby of the England team. He was only 23 and had played in just three Tests before being pitched into it. He didn’t get a substantial amount of runs.

Apart from fifties in both innings at Old Trafford, the limelight didn’t track him the way it did Andrew Flintoff or Kevin Pietersen. But sometimes just the fluidity of a single shot was so well timed, so beautifully exquisite in its execution that it amazed me.

He was neat and gracefully compact, his movement gorgeous to watch. I didn’t want to miss a ball when he came in, thinking I could learn something. I would have paid at the gate to study him alone.

Even his walk to the wicket had an authority about it.

He had a Slazenger bat. I had a Slazenger bat too, and in the nets at St Peter’s School in York I tried to copy him — the lovely arc of his pick-up, the lovelier follow-through. He’d sometimes hold the final position of the shot, as though posing for a sculptor who was about to start chipping away at some vast block of stone. I watched him with awe and I wanted to be like him. I also wanted to play against Australia, but it was not the sort of private thought you made too public because it sounded fanciful — even more crazy than telling everyone you planned to fly to the moon simply by flapping your arms.

But less than eight years later, on an overcast early afternoon, I came down the shallow drop of stone steps that lead out of the wooden pavilion at Trent Bridge. It was my first Ashes Test. We were batting on a pitch that was the colour of parched wheat. We were in a bit of trouble: 124 for four.

There was a small swarm of butterflies doing aerobatics in my stomach. I was wearing my game-face, as sternly serious as I could make it. My new partner was leaning on his bat at the Radcliffe Road end. He nodded a greeting to me, and I nodded back. It was Ian Bell.

An over or two later, he got a delivery that wasn’t too full or too wide. The front foot went forward, as elegantly as a ballet step. He leant into the ball and drilled it through the covers. It was one of those shots that you know, as soon as it hums off the middle, that the fielder isn’t there to stop the ball, but merely to bring it back.

It could have been 2005 all over again … except that I was now part of the action.