First cricket net of the year. You betcha. Done.

Running in to bowl was like running through chocolate and now every time in sneeze it's like a hand grenade going off in my rib-cage. It was good to get it out of the way though. It can feel a bit sad knowing that when you do something, you will never be as good as you once were at it. It's a bit annoying but there you go. We all get bald, fat, slow and shit.

The 2012 season nears. Like most cricket clubs countrywide, Preston is starting to yawn, stretch and fart itself awake from its winter hibernation. Snow still covers the ground but the faint taint of ionised air on the wind, the sound of the wood-pigeon's in the woods and the fact that I have already bowled a cricket ball into the roof of a sports hall means that the season and indeed spring will soon be here. April is the magical month, when we don the whites again, try and hit a slow moving ball with a piece of wood and relish in the spring and summer ales at the Red Lion.

Having recently been on the receiving end of a particularly aggressive, snatch and grab Kronenbourg session in Bedfordshire, it would be better to ease off and settle for some milder beers. After all, I am in training. Driving in the front seat of someone's (don't know who's) car, it was like being at the steering wheel of the Enterprise and Starship Command had advertised that there was free sex at HQ for one night only. To be frank, Mr Zulu could well have been driving for all I knew. The streaks of light whizzing past and the lurching cornering made me hang on to lunch for dear life.

A new dawn possibly at Preston. We have had to manage a lot through the winter months and some changing of the guard at the Club. But we will still be there. We must look to encourage the younger members to get more involved and I am pleased that some are beginning too. This is essential or we will indeed whither on the vine.

The younger lads want to make it more professional which makes sense to be fair. Get to the ground early, look the nuts and doing warm-ups. Before, the idea of a warm-up was forgetting your lighter and having to walk back to the cricket bag to get it. You would have to hurdle over the other bags of course and long jump over the puddles of pee that collect in every cricket changing room corner. Warm up done, right?

Soon the outdoor nets will start. Every 5th ball you get will smash all three out of the ground while the rest of the 3 and a half minutes you get in bat will be picking the dog-digested cricket balls out from the stingers or off the top of the nets themselves. Soon, the fielding practices, the high-catches, the re-opening of hairline fractures, the falling over, etc.