I don't know how it started, but I do know why. I was 12 years old when Barry Richards came to Fleet Cricket Club, my club, with the rest of the Hampshire team for a benefit match. In my mind it lingers as a golden summer afternoon, our tree-lined ground green and shimmering in the warm air. From nowhere, miraculously, a crowd had appeared and ringed the boundary. I'd never seen the place where I played cricket look anything like it did that day.

He walked out to bat wearing his blue Hampshire cap, under it the same fuzz of hair and teeth that I'd seen on TV in the John Player League. Now he was here in front of me, in the flesh. I was almost levitating with joy. He batted for an hour or so, making 60-odd before engineering a dismissal, a dutiful innings that for him was probably forgotten before he'd left the car park but for me still lives - the ramp shot he played to the club's feared fast bowler Dave "Dinger" Bell; the leg-side pick-up that landed on the first green of the adjacent golf course. Beyond that, there was the reaction of the crowd: the oohs and the aahs and the astonished cheers. What power it was, to hold everyone in thrall the way that Barry Richards did. It couldn't have been any more exotic had someone released a leopard onto the outfield. The combination of the extraordinary and the fact it was happening somewhere I knew so well, where I could walk out and bat myself, was improbable, intoxicating, lasting.

It was also enough to open a space in my life for cricket. I had already been to a Test match, during the endless heatwave of the previous summer, when Viv Richards made 291 against England at The Oval. It was an amazing thing to see but it was set on a vast scale, The Oval huge and brown in the thrumming city, the players 90 yards away and not much bigger than they appeared on television. It was spectacular yet daunting, in a way that the match at Fleet was not. At Fleet, every detail was vivid; the speed of the ball, the sound it made on the bat, the easy brilliance of the Hampshire fielding. You could even hear the players talking to one another. It was an open door and I walked right through.

It must have been that Christmas or the one after when I got The Barry Richards Story, his newly published autobiography, and began to understand that Barry Richards' life was more complex than the one he seemed to be living. To me, if you could bat like Barry Richards, hitting "Dinger" Bell onto the pitch and putt course, why would you not want to do that as often as possible? But there was his doleful sentence, right in front of me in black and white: "I know that when I walk off a county ground for the final time - whenever that may be - it will be with an enormous sense of relief."

Cricket is a game that demands time above all else. Adulthood can force a separation from which some will never return. And yet cricket is always there, waiting

As it turned out, he already had. He was 32 years old. His career, briefly re-energised by Kerry Packer and World Series Cricket, would trickle on for a couple of seasons in South Africa, but that afternoon at Fleet was the only time I saw him bat live. It was enough. I practised obsessively trying to emulate his game. For a while I tried to adopt his stance at the crease, feet together and hunched over the bat. I looked for similarities in our lives. We had both played at Fleet for a start. And we had both faced "Dinger" Bell, admittedly with differing levels of success. We were both openers - or at least that was how I liked to think of myself. Beyond these thin threads, I was struggling.

From the pages of The Barry Richards Story and from every other source I could find, came the evidence of his ineffable genius: the nine hundreds before lunch; 325 in a day against an attack that included Dennis Lillee, Graham McKenzie and Tony Lock (during which he went from 79 to 216 between lunch and tea); the 90 minutes he spent batting with Viv Richards during a Packer Super Test when he made 93 to Viv's 41; and on and on and on… the days that he amused himself by dividing the ground into a clock face and hit a boundary through each "hour"; playing out an over using the edge of his bat in a club game (this when the edges of bats were wafer-thin: he could probably make a hundred with the edge of David Warner's cudgel).

By contrast, my top score in my first year of cricket was 22, which wasn't exactly Richardsesque, but the feeling of being at the crease while runs came was addictive: I still remember how my best went up over the next few seasons - 41, 52, 74… numbers that I've remembered ever since, the feeling the same each time, a strange kind of joy unavailable elsewhere. Those early days of cricket, especially the matches played on summer evenings in light that cast giant shadows across the outfield, live in the memory like few others - to me, it's still the most magical time to play.

Watching Barry Richards bat at Fleet was a privilege reserved for few © Getty Images

I moved to a village club called Wrecclesham, birthplace of one of the most famous men in cricket's early history, William "Silver Billy" Beldham, who swashbuckled his runs from the front foot (a brand new idea), fathered, it's somewhat fancifully claimed, 39 children (probably more like eight or nine, but who was counting?), and retired to tend the Barley Mow pub at Tilford, where he made bats in the back room.

We played at Tilford, where the Barley Mow still overlooks the ground and the pavilion sits on the far side of a small road that the incoming batsman must cross, and at so many other beautiful places that dot the Southern counties where cricket first grew and flourished - Frensham's tiny bowl, Farnham's hilltop field set next to a ruined castle wall.

Cricket became about time and place as well as winning and losing. I started playing a few games for Wrecclesham men's Sunday side, an entry into another new world. There was Peter, the opening bat who dreamed of hitting the first ball of a match for six and perished many times trying, and Cyril, the grey-bearded and iron-gloved wicketkeeper who could get through a whole match without uttering a word. I began to understand that everyone had their own reason for playing the game, and being successful on the pitch was only a part of that.

The game has many faces, and as you grow older the face that is turned towards you is not the one that you used to see. In place of ambition were simpler things

Wrecclesham's junior team was good, though. We had an all-action pair of siblings, Ian and Alan Thorpe, who won us plenty of matches but would always talk about their youngest brother Graham as being better than both of them. They weren't wrong about that.

I discovered that we were all floating upwards to the ceiling of our talent. The vast majority of us top out at some level of club cricket. A few may get further and have trials and representative games, and a few of those may be considered by professional clubs, and a few of those would actually get taken on and make it through the second team and into county sides. Even fewer may achieve some sort of international recognition, in A teams and limited-overs games, and even fewer than that would play Test cricket. A few of the few, like Graham Thorpe, would flourish in Test cricket. And a handful of people on earth, players like Barry Richards, would find that for them there was no ceiling: they would be tested by the very best at the highest level and still be better than everyone else.

Wrecclesham's own: Farnham-born Graham Thorpe went all the way to Test level for England © Getty Images

Anyone who began in the game stood at the foot of these mountains. High up in them was a dividing range that the professionals crossed and the amateurs didn't. Professionals played for their living, for the livelihood of their families. Their existence was precarious, subject to the forces of form and luck, of injury and psychology and age. They played when they wanted to and when they didn't, and they played all day, all summer, all year. And once cricket became work, its meaning had to change. This was why Barry Richards, who played innings that filled grounds and newspapers and inspired the imagination of many thousands, could, at the age of 32, write the sentence, "I know that when I walk off a county ground for the final time - whenever that may be - it will be with an enormous sense of relief."

For the amateur cricketer, for the cricket watcher or reader, that white heat of an early obsession with the game has to go somewhere else, has to become something different. It has to fit in with the rest of life, become smaller to accommodate other things. That is not always easy. Cricket is a game that demands time above all else. Adulthood can force a separation from which some will never return. And yet cricket is always there, waiting.

"I know that when I walk off a county ground for the final time - whenever that may be - it will be with an enormous sense of relief" Barry Richards

My dad is the reason that the game was there for me. He didn't just admit me into a club and drive me to matches and nets and bowl at me for endless hours in the back garden after he'd put in a full day's work; he took me to my first day's Test cricket, where Viv Richards made that 291, and somehow (I've never discovered how) got us tickets to two World Cup finals: in 1979, when King Viv made 138 not out against England, and 1983, when he was caught by Kapil Dev right in front of us on the Tavern boundary and India won a victory that would change the game forever. In between, we went to a one-day final where Viv made 117. (Many years later, when I had the chance to interview him, I said that I'd seen him get 291, 138 and 117. "You see, Sir Viv," I said, "you were getting worse every time..." He laughed, thank god.)

After all that, there was no real mystery to my love for cricket, but there was to my dad's. He was born in 1927 into a different world. Douglas Jardine topped the national batting averages. Bodyline was still five years away. My dad grew up in Hackney in a house with no electricity. He left school when he was 12 and stayed in London throughout the Second World War. He was conscripted into the navy on VE Day. Yet somehow in the middle of all of this he found the game. He remembers a schoolteacher who would put coins on stumps in the playground and give them to any kid who could knock him over. He was at The Oval when Eric Hollies bowled Bradman. He loved the way cricket looked when it was played properly, and although he admired Barry Richards, his great hero while I was growing up was Geoffrey Boycott, who appealed to his immaculate nature. He'd urge to me to study the great man's technique and try to emulate it.

"But he just stays in," I'd say.

"Yes, son - that's the point."

For a while my obsession faded. Through the 1990s the game was background noise. It's hard to know exactly why: it was more of a fade away than a burn out. I'd always struggled with nerves when I was playing, and the pleasure of making an occasional score didn't weigh heavy enough against the other side of the scale. I sometimes dreaded something that was supposed to be fun. A summer came and went, then another, then another. Life changed, and filled up with other things. I discovered, like many a player, that I got far better when I wasn't in the team.

Mark Ramprakash was an emblem of the English game in the '90s © PA Photos

It was a splintered time for English cricket too. Its emblematic players were Mark Ramprakash and Graeme Hick, who by cosmic fluke debuted in the same match - a rare England win - and whose fortunes seemed hostage to their temperaments: Ramprakash's inhibiting rage to succeed contrasting with Hick's apparent diffidence. Everything, from the weather to the chaotic fiddling of the selectors and the board seemed to militate against success. I was a fan of Ramprakash and grew tired of the shambles that surrounded his constant selections and banishments. And as England scrabbled about in the dirt, Australia rose. I lived there for three years at the peak of their dynasty and saw how much more easily cricket fit into a sun-drenched, unselfconscious place.

I know exactly when the love returned too. I had been back in England for a while and took a drive out to Farnham, to the ground by the castle on the hill. I sat on the boundary watching the play and then it came, a sort of intense sense-memory of batting there as a kid. I could feel exactly how it was to stand at the crease, the light, the heat, the sounds of the bat tapping the ground. In that instant, it was back.

I found a club and began to play again. The emotions were the same, and the desire to do well, but I slowly began to realise the other great truth of cricket. The game has many faces, and as you grow older the face that is turned towards you is not the one that you used to see. The experience was different but no less complete. In place of ambition were simpler things - the sun, the ground, the camaraderie, the feelings of escape from whatever crap was going on everywhere else in the world.

Cricket could be a solace and a consolation too. I was becoming one of those boring old farts who muttered at the television while the game was on, and so I started a blog. I found that there was a new universe out there online, watching and listening, reading and writing, a great clamour of voices that democratised the way cricket was perceived and presented. Who could not love that?

I knew that what we were watching in the post-T20 world was an advance in technique and skill unseen since Grace and then Ranji and Fry took cricket into its first golden age. Sehwag, Gayle, Pietersen, de Villiers, McCullum and more were outliers changing the parameters of the game. Their influence, which we are just beginning to feel, will be irrevocable and long-lasting.

We have been lucky to live through it - after all, we cannot choose the point in cricket history that we are born, or when we will exit for the last time. If there is such a thing as a cricketing life, then this is it: one that joins with the rushing stream as it speeds past, and rides along in the current for a while.

I sometimes wonder: if I could watch one innings again live, which one would I pick? I think I've always known the answer, despite all of those glorious moments out on the professional fields - it would be Barry Richards on that day at Fleet, the day it all began.

Jon Hotten blogs here. @theoldbatsman

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