‘Doing the double’ in sport usually refers to winning both a league and a cup in the same season but in cricket it also describes scoring a thousand runs and taking a hundred wickets in a first-class season. Here, though, I am using it in the context of doubling your season’s total of runs in a single innings, indeed with a single shot, actually with a single.

This was not the only dramatic feature of our defeat in our last Wednesday evening T20 of 2019. We were well beaten by a strong young South Oxfordshire Amateurs side but even so, we could have won if only we had hit six sixes off the last over. By the time I went out to bat with three balls to go, we were on 117 for 8, chasing their total of 149 so we needed 11 off each delivery. I missed the first, hit the second confidently (pictured by club vice-captain, Tim House, above) and got off the mark with the last ball of the game.

Wait a minute, I hear our members cry, how on earth was I batting when we were only eight wickets down? That is the very point which made it such a special moment in my stint as captain. Well into my fourth season as club captain, I have hitherto had an unblemished record of batting at number 11 in each match. On this occasion, however, one of our distinguished medics diagnosed himself as injured beyond repair and unable to bat, so I went in at number 10.

No sooner had I taken this bold step than Joe Root has followed suit. The Daily Telegraph reports, ahead of the Ashes series, that, ‘England’s Test captain, Joe Root, will bat at No 3 … after personally offering to move up the order to solve the team’s growing batting crisis … since becoming captain {he had} said he likes the extra time batting at four gives him to switch off mentally from deciding tactics in the field.’

Translated to our setting, this would read: ‘Middleton Stoney’s club captain, Simon Lee, will bat at No 10 … after personally offering to move up the order to solve the team’s growing batting crisis … since becoming captain {he had} said he likes the extra time batting at 11 gives him to switch off mentally from deciding tactics in the field.’

Mind you, as Joe Root would discover if he were to bat at 11 or 10 for us, deciding tactics is not just the captain’s lot when we are in the field. At the precise moment when called to bat, I was pondering the vexed questions of who should run the barbecue for us and who should be asked to write the match report.

And when has Joe Root ever had to face a bowler who, in his day job, has just supplied his team with their new caps? As it was twilight, I trusted that he (the bowler, not Joe Root) would not have expected me to have worn my cap.

Anyway, I doubled my total for the season, both in balls faced and in run(s) scored, a double double, albeit not quite of the order of George Hirst’s double double in 1906, 2,000+ runs and 200+ wickets. Will there be a Jack Leach moment in which I open the batting? Certainly not, but I am now having to adjust my claims as a captain, to having ‘always been the last man in’ from my favoured ‘always putting myself at number 11’. Whatever next? Would I take my first wicket of the season in our last Sunday game in July or would the quest for a wicket (or now two wickets) to keep pace with runs go into August?