Remember the score

Chris England, a star of the Bollywood hit Lagaan, has an alternative use for the reams of cricket stats he has collected down the years

Frank Hayes on his way to page 106 against West Indies in 1973 © Getty Images

For some reason I have never got on with bookmarks. Not the old dental appointment card, not the glossy strips with the bookshop's website printed on that are stuffed into every new purchase, nor even the souvenir-style thick leather strap with an etching of the Scarborough seafront which instantly cracks the spine of any paperback I try to close on it. Nor, I might add, am I a page-corner-turner-downer.

Instead I use cricket. Whenever I am reading a book and have to stop for whatever reason - train pulling into destination, eyelids closing of their own accord - I use a lifetime's playing and watching cricket to memorise the page number. Over the years most of the numbers you would expect to crop up on the pages of a book (ie whole numbers) have acquired some kind of cricketing resonance. Even some fractions can do the job. If I ever have to set a book aside a third of the way through page 27, say, I have only to think of the Test batting average of Mark Stumprakrash to mark my place.

My own playing career for my D-list celeb team, "An England XI", usually gets me through the opening chapters. There is a fondly remembered 20 off a single Dirty Den over, for example, and a 30 abruptly ended by TV's Eddie Shoestring. Personal bookmarks do, I admit, become more spaced out after 50 and I will sometimes read on an extra few pages just to recall again an idyllic sunlit 72 featuring a huge lost-ball six into a cornfield.

Towards three figures my spectating associations are beginning to kick in. At page 99 I am thinking of plucky nightwatchman Alex Tudor, stranded one short of a Test ton after an inexplicable run spurt by county chum Graham Thorpe at the other end. Page 106 recalls the thrilling debut Test ton of my boyhood hero Frank Hayes. Back in the summer of 1973 he was a swashbuckling, blond, good-looking superman. Looking now at pictures of him then he doesn't seem so particularly good-looking but then this was an era in which Starsky and Hutch were thought rather dishy.

As a Lancashire supporter, other favourite bookmarks include Foxy Fowler's 201 in Madras and Bumble's 214 not out against India during Sir Geoffrey's self-imposed exile from the Test arena until such time as all the scary fast bowlers had gone away. And while we are on Boycott, I suppose 191 should really be his hundredth hundred but for me it is a number I saw Mike Atherton compile in a monster championship game at The Oval, as Neil Fairbrother improvised a sparkling 366 at the other end.

Some of my memory-joggers will be common to every cricket lover. Page 149, for example, is naturally Botham's smashfest at Headingley in 1981. At the top end there has always been Sobers at page 365, then Lara at 375, and now Matthew Hayden has obligingly extended my reach to books that are 380 pages long. Then there are Vaughan's near misses marking pages 195 and 197, Trescothick flamboyant at 219, Amiss defiant at 262, Zaheer specky at 274, VVS Laxman heroic at 281, Richards muscular and rippling at 291 and poor old Hicky marooned by a dullard's declaration halfway down page 405. And 174 will always and for ever be Derek Randall in the 1976-77 Centenary Test, the game in which the great man so enraged Marsh, Lillee and Co with his constant chirruping to himself. I once opened with Randall in a meaningless bog-standard testimonial match and even then he spent the whole time geeing himself up with a "Come on Rags!" He probably queues up at Sainsbury's muttering: "Come on Rags! You can buy these corn flakes ... "

Try this yourself. As a feat of memory, using cricket bookmarks is not especially demanding - definitely more Rain Men than Rain Man. Big numbers, you see, that is the great thing about cricket. Football? Useless for anything longer than a pamphlet.