I’d like to claim I last wore a cap playing cricket in the back garden around 1960. The cap must have belonged to one of my two older brothers, who were at primary school, as must the shin pads which I was wearing to guard my legs from some pretty hostile bowling.

In fact, though, I did wear a cap one other time, when Middleton Stoney’s Graeme Delaney celebrated his 60th birthday with a game in which he supplied caps, a brass band and gin in the jellies at tea. It would have been churlish to have declined the cap while enjoying the rest of that party.

In general, though, I dislike cricket (and other) caps. Yet I like stash, as Carnegie students and staff used to call it. Club captaincy, or any other leadership role in life, can draw you in to all kinds of sartorial and other style challenges, in the cause of promoting a team identity.

In universities, for example, lanyard-wearing has become a highly competitive team sport, setting out which part of the institution you most identify with – is it the overall uni, your school or faculty, your trade union or the students’ union, a pride in this or that, a conference you are attending, a cause you are promoting?

Middleton Stoney CC already has club trousers, shirts, sweaters, bowler’s run-up markers and boundary flags but the cost of caps had been prohibitive until our Honorary Secretary mustered over twenty orders, at which point the price became almost affordable.

Then came The Long Wait for the bespoke caps to be hand-crafted. Delivery has been slower than some of our opening bowlers’ undisguised slower balls. And that is slow.

Today, however, rumour has it that the caps are in the vicinity. Since I joined the club in 2011, there has been no opportunity to buy a club cap but it looks possible that the cap-less-ness of newcomers could be about to change on Sunday.

So what is it about team kit that is so exciting? It will not, of itself, prevent any haplessness on the field. In friendly Sunday cricket, it will not even stop some players from wearing their county or old school or other club kit. But it will be one small nod, so to speak, towards enhancing the sense of a club identity. Our club ethos statement says, on kit, that, ‘We try to look the part’. The ‘try to’ is the weakest of the claims in the ten point plan, recognising the challenge of getting all shapes, sizes and ages to wear the same kit.

By my calculations, tea-time on Sunday will be half-way through our season. More than that, if the caps do materialise, if they are the right colours and if they are wearable, it will be peak season for the club identity of Middleton Stoney CC.