WHY don’t England cricketers get sunstroke after shaving their heads any more, or pose in their underwear for women’s magazines, or arrive late for practice and blame it on a flat tyre? OK, so they might beat Australia but the game is a bit less colourful without players like Chris Lewis.

It is ten years since Lewis played the last of his 32 Tests and six since he retired from the county game. The broad smile and lean frame are still there, but so is the enigma.

Today he will be an elder statesman in the Professional Cricketers’ Association XI that provides the last opposition for the Sri Lankans before they take on England. He will play a Twenty20 match at Arundel alongside younger men such as Matt Prior, Darren Maddy and Chris Tremlett.

“I think the PCA have picked me because I’m one of the few ex-pros who can still stand up,” Lewis said. “I played against Australia last year, made one not out off one ball and bowled two overs, so it’s not the most strenuous of days.”

Lewis is a fan of Twenty20 but it would not suit his style. “It is very exciting but I wasn’t all that great at batting in one-day cricket. People expected me to come in and go wham, bam, wallop, but it often didn’t happen.”

He made his England debut in a one-day match against West Indies on his 22nd birthday in 1990 and played 53 one-day internationals, averaging 14 with the bat and taking 66 wickets. He was a more accomplished Test cricketer, scoring 1,105 runs at an average of 23 and taking 93 wickets.

Many felt Lewis did not live up to his ability. “I’m philosophical about it,” he said. “I could have done better, that’s no great admission. But putting it in perspective, I think of me as a five-year-old kid in Guyana dreaming of playing any sort of cricket and I did better than that. Even just pulling on an England shirt was an achievement.”

Perhaps that is it: he felt he had done enough simply by making the team. These days, Team England tries to get more out of supposedly “difficult” players. “Maybe with better handling, I’d have done better. I look at the way the England set-up works under Duncan Fletcher now and I think . . .” he trails off and then corrects himself. “But I’m a pro. It was my fault.”

The responsibility was certainly his when The Sun labelled him “The Prat without a Hat” after he was forced off the field having shaved his head and not worn any protection before the first match of England’s tour of the West Indies in 1994.

Lewis feels he was driven out of the county game. After alleging that three England team-mates had taken bribes to throw matches — a charge that was never substantiated — he was jeered by crowds and cold-shouldered by players. It coincided with a decline in form and he walked away aged 32.

But Lewis still gives a lot to the game. At the weekends, he drives from his home in Wembley to Derbyshire, where he plays for Clifton. Dominates them would be a fairer term: he opens the batting and the bowling, has an average of 98 and 20 in each discipline this season and captains the side, too. “I’m crap at that,” he said. Nothing has changed: he captained Leicestershire in 1998 but a month before they won the championship he was dropped for failing to turn up to nets.

He also plays for Lashings, the all-star pub team, alongside such legends as Richie Richardson and Courtney Walsh. “It’s great, you meet people you’ve not seen for years,” he said. “Jimmy Adams and I first met on a cricket field in Australia 20 years ago.”

When he’s not playing, he coaches children in Berkshire. “I genuinely feel I have something to offer,” he said. “I love seeing the buzz kids get when it goes right, like when they first swing the ball or the joy of a perfect square cut. I don’t want to be arrogant but I think I can teach a five-year-old how to do a square cut.”

Just so long as he also teaches them to wear sunscreen and turn up promptly.