The hardest hit

As a modest club legspinner the "finest hours" column on my Wisden.com player page wouldn't be terribly long, but bowling a dot ball to Aravinda de Silva would be fairly high on the list. He did treat that first delivery with the utmost respect. A slight shame about the second one, which he hit over the clock, but we'll gloss over that. It was in 1984, shortly after Aravinda had made his Test debut as a slight, slim 18-year-old. He was guesting for the Boston Ramblers, an Essex club, on the Nursery ground at Lord's. I was playing for the Cross Arrows, the Lord's staff team, and made the mistake of taking a wicket and bringing Aravinda to the crease.

But my main memory of that day isn't of being smacked for six (although that winter I watched him hook the West Indians over the fence in Australia, and nodded knowingly and sympathetically). It is of having a ball hit at me harder than anyone else has ever done, before or since.

One of our enthusiastic wannabe fast bowlers pitched one a little short at Aravinda. He leant back and hammered it at point, who unfortunately happened to be me. I remembered all the fielding basics. Long barrier - drop smoothly onto left knee, knee next to right foot to present the biggest possible obstacle, effortlessly take the ball in cupped hands ...

The trouble was that by the time the long barrier was in position I heard the crack of ball on boundary board. And I hadn't been slow in going down (well, not that slow, anyway). The ball had blasted past me in a millisecond. At the end of the over I trotted over to the bowler and apologised. "Never mind," he said. "It's probably a good thing you didn't get down in time - it would have broken your leg."