I’ve been waiting a long time for the right moment to post this song. After spending yesterday at Lord’s bidding farewell to Jimmy Anderson, England’s greatest ever bowler, after 21 years, this is that moment.

It’s so perfectly elegiac, conjuring perfectly the atmosphere of village cricket, that most genteel of sports, with its attendant smell of new-mown grass, sunscreen and the sweet sound of leather on willow.

I’m sure all cricket fans love it; I know that John Peel requested it to be played on the radio when he died, which it was (by DJ Andy Kershaw) in 2004.

It was because of Peel, and my own love of cricket, that I bought the album from which it’s taken, HQ, when it came out in 1975 on the lovely Harvest label.

It’s simple in construction: Roy Harper plays a 12-string acoustic guitar and is backed by the Grimethorpe Colliery Brass Band, whose music seems synonymous with cricket’s spiritual heartland of Yorkshire.

Harper paints a perfect picture of the game as a metaphor for the passing of time, and references two old cricketers in the line: “And it could be Geoff, and it could be John, With a new ball swing in his tail.”

England’s opening batsman Geoff Boycott and opening bowler John Snow were very much part of my childhood, seemingly ever-preset fixtures in the England test team for a decade or more (though I have to confess that, growing up, I always assumed that “Geoff” was Snow’s bowling partner Geoff Arnold).

But it’s not, because the song is dedicated to Boycott and Snow. And it still brings a tear to the eye every single time – as did Jimmy’s departure yesterday. I hope he knows the song too.