Sri Lanka, here we come

I'm in that familiar state of pre-tour fantasy. In a week's time I'll be lucky enough to fly out to Sri Lanka with the Authors Cricket Club, a team of writers I helped revive in 2012 with literary agent and author Charlie Campbell. Despite a dismal overseas record of played 21, lost 20, won 1 - when the gods of weather and swing bowling converged on the hillside of a tea estate in Nuwara Eliya - we still approach each tour with a boyish and unfounded optimism. From a dark and wet January in England, visions of match-winning hat-tricks, miraculous feats of six-hitting, and diving catches that only players with superpowers could possibly hold, fill the waking thoughts of grown men. This time we're coming home victorious.

Then we shamble up to our first, and last, tour-preparation net. Some of us even have new kit that we got for Christmas, and others have received coaching or been in front of a bowling machine. The chatter in the changing room is upbeat about our chances in Sri Lanka. We know what to expect now - scorching heat, superior cricketers - and we've recruited a pacey tyro who's half the age of our more "experienced" players.

So we start batting and bowling. The tyro zips red blurs past our heads, bats and into our stumps, or bodies (I may well resign from the macho "no thigh pad club" I founded last season, considering the purple blotches on my leg), and our more portly player manages to fall over in his run-up, tumbling over like Charlie Chaplin, if Charlie Chaplin drank bitter and binged on pie and pizza. Balls are whanged into the side netting, two players retire injured from their batting session, one with a dislocated shoulder. Our star opener holds a palm out to stop a straight drive, and spends the rest of the night massaging his hand back into shape. After 60 minutes we're sweating, red-faced and limping, and agree to regroup in the bar to talk tactics.

One of the walking wounded is the Cordon's very own Jonathan Wilson. Forever keen to improve his worth as a cricketer, Wilson's vigorous gym regime is second only to his ferocious output as a journalist. Except this time his dumbbell ebullience has twanged a muscle in his groin. And to add insult to injury, when he sits down on a bench in the pub, a splinter jabs his buttock and he jumps up and yelps in pain. Eventually he manages to extract the wooden needle, without, I should add, offending any of the ladies present, before we get down to business and work out how we're going to win at least one game in Sri Lanka.

Unfortunately, as we've found out on previous campaigns to the subcontinent - and even Italy, where a team of youthful seminarians representing the Vatican XI spanked our bowling attack out of the race course ground in Rome - we get sunburnt easily, melt like soap in the heat, are usually hungover, and end up facing either ex-internationals or rising prospects. This week we discovered that the prodigy we sponsored back in 2014, Pathum Nissanka, is currently playing for Sri Lanka Under-19s. Of course, it's wonderful that this young star is shining ever brighter, and that I'll be bowling against him next week.

Last time I ran in to try and knock his stumps over, I was bowling quick, and with each stroke that he glided me to the boundary rope, I added more gas. And with that acceleration he used even less effort, clipping, cutting and feathering the ball through the gaps. Well, that won't happen on this tour. Not because I'm idiotic enough to believe I've somehow transformed into a faster and more lethal bowler despite the fact that I'm two years older, but because I'm now bowling legspin. He'll at least have to use more muscle to put me over the ropes if I'm bowling slow full tosses.

Testing out my new spin attack in Sri Lanka is rather like learning to swim in the Bering Sea. Wristspin is an art form that can only be honed with years of practice and coaching. I've been working on it for a season, and I shall be bowling at batsmen who have grown up playing a rotating cricket ball. Still, I know there's a genuine drifting and turning jaffa in my armoury, and I just have to remove the one, or sometimes two, gift balls per over. I should also consider how much I'll learn facing local spin, if I can stay at the crease long enough.

Despite the wild odds of success, we're excited because we know we don't even need to win for a remarkable experience. Flying out to play cricket in India or Sri Lanka feels like a holy pilgrimage. The game may have been born on the chalk downs of Hambledon, and the Home of Cricket rests in St John's Wood, but the effervescent life force of the sport, from the firecracker glitz of the IPL to ad hoc games on streets and parks, lies closer to the equator. And as a pale-skinned auburn-haired cricketer I shall take inspiration from England's record-breaking duo in Cape Town, Ben Stokes and Jonny Bairstow, who showed that gingers can actually go out in the midday sun without getting heatstroke.