Class

And no, I'm not talking about my cover drive.

I'd love to think going to a private school in a largely working class city gave me a rounded view of the game. Certainly it's fair to say that if I can play at all, it's not down to any one kind of learning. Private education gave me a technique, but league cricket taught me how to use it.

In some ways that upbringing embodies a cliched dichotomy that rests at the heart of the game in England: the image of the posh opening batsman with his high left elbow playing alongside the fast bowler hewn from the Yorkshire mines. It was perhaps naive to imagine that once the old distinction of "gentlemen" and "players" was eroded and professionalism became the by-word, then the issue of class would entirely disappear from the game, but I wonder if anyone in 1962 would have guessed that England's captain 50 years later would be an elegant opening batsman who learned his game at Radley?

Of course that's a somewhat flippant point, but the private schools still churn out their fair share of batsmen (hardly ever bowlers). It's not hard to see why. The best pitches I batted on for the first 18 years of my life were found at the school matches. Anyone with a good technique, one based largely on timing, as opposed to hitting the ball, could make plenty of runs. And with free access to nets and coaching near enough on tap, that's what many people had. Lower level league games - us colts rarely ventured beyond the 3rd XI in my club - hardly encouraged stroke play. With uneven bounce a regularity, it was more a case of waiting for the bad bowler, rather than the bad ball.

Schools cricket was a level playing field. Aged 14/15, league cricket was, literally, men against boys. The idea of a tough learning curve was endemic. I bowled a man with a no-ball: the captain didn't ask me to work out my run up - he called me a fucking twat. I came in at 8 and was supposed to hold up an end while our overseas pro tried to win us the game, but an adult bounced me out and nearly broke my wrist. I got back to the pavilion was told I shouldn't be in the team. It was a very different experience. At a somewhat higher standard, Andrew Strauss claims in his autobiography that he wouldn't even have made it as a pro, let alone a Test player, had it not been for his year playing Australian club cricket (marginally tougher than the league games I played, I expect - he describes the sight of 'Brett Lee bowling 90mph thunderbolts at a batsman with no helmet').

Odd too, how those who make it to the very top seem to so encapsulate their social mileu. Simon Wilde's new book posits Ian Botham as the ultimate Thatcherite hero - the slightly crass, self-made ubermensch who ran roughshod over the playing fields of the Establishment. Pietersen and Trott were just two of thousands of immigrants who made their way to England in the noughties, attracted by a surging economy and strong pound (KP has even said as much).

A couple of years back, when my club was arguing over the kinds of games it wanted to play, the issue of class began to seep into the discussions. Some of us, myself included, wanted to play what we thought were 'better' fixtures - and soon they seemed to become synonymous with 'posher' fixtures. I suppose there was some truth in that. But that hadn't been how I'd seen it -  I'd never really given it any consideration at all. Despite the wildly different forms of the game I'd played, to my mind, cricket existed in a social limbo - it had always been the same ball coming down, after all. I find the thought of politics - social or otherwise - impinging on the game an anathema. But I guess the more you think about it, the more you realise it's an inevitability.