I was umpiring in a Sunday friendly a few weeks ago between my club and another local team with which we are on good terms.

I paid my usual scant attention to what was going on before the game started, and took up my place at square leg for the first over. So far so normal. As the first ball is bowled, the fielder at square leg, whom I haven't seen in the preliminaries, walks in as the chap is bowling and I notice a long blond ponytail protruding from the back of their baseball cap.

"O tempera O mores - get your hair cut!" I think, until I notice that right under the ponytail, there is a girl's bottom. So now I realise that I have volunteered to umpire in what has now become a parody of a game of cricket.

As a few overs pass, my discombobulation subsides, and then after about eight overs, horror of horrors, the captain says to me "new bowler umpire, same action" and lobs the ball to this girl. I now start having nightmares about the next over never ending as this girl bowls wide after wide or has to retrieve the ball from halfway down the track, since everyone knows that girls just do not play cricket. Anyway, in she comes, the first ball describes a perfect outswinger's parabola and thuds into the keeper's gloves at a fair pace. Our guy batting has scored 139no the day before in a League game of decent standard, and lasts precisely four balls, when he nicks another away-nipper behind.

Not content with blowing away my prejudices with her bowling, this young girl later chases a ball down to prevent a four and hurls the ball over the top of the stumps from 60 yards away. Her father is their captain, and when I express my stunned admiration for his daughter at the tea interval, he says, "yeah, she's not bad, but we've got a couple better."

So we play them again a couple of weeks later, and they have indeed got another couple of girls just as good, both bowlers, and the original girl, now with a shoulder injury and unable to bowl, scores a well-constructed 30-odd.

All three of them play for Essex Under-19, and having not visited the County Ground since Richard and Haynes took Lever and Co apart in about 1980, I'm going to go and watch them play for the county first chance I get.

Enjoyed the story

what is the point of women's 20/20 ?

Surely the whole point of 20/20 is to see the ball being carted over the ropes and flying into the crowd

I'm not sure if many of them can hit it off the square