Eight decades and counting – age is no barrier to enjoying cricket

Bert Sadler isn't expecting a call from the Guardian. He's out carting hay bales. He's been at it since dawn. "He'll be back in the house around sundown, I suppose," says his wife Sally, "once he's finished work for the day." Bert is 83. He played his first game of cricket around about the time the Allies landed in Sicily, in July 1943. He played his last game of cricket a little over a week ago, on 25 August. And he has played each and every one of the 70 seasons in between, 25 of them for Cutsdean, 42 for Winchcombe, the rest for Aldsworth, three villages in the country outside Cheltenham, where he has lived all his life. They say Bert may be the oldest amateur cricketer in England, certainly he is one of the few whose careers have spanned eight decades.

When Bert made his debut for Cutsdean he was a thin, young bowler, and fast with it. That same season Alec Bedser made a name for himself playing for the RAF at Lord's, with a hat-trick against the West Indians. But Bert's heroes were all local lads, like the lanky off-spinner Tom Goddard, the brilliant young batsman Tom Graveney, who would make his county debut in 1948. And Hammond. Of course Hammond, the brightest star in the boy's firmament. "Oh yes, all that lot," he says. "There's been some good cricketers round about here."

Must be something in the cider. All three would play on into old age. Though none so long as Bert. Goddard didn't retire until he was 51. Graveney went on into his 40s, not just championship cricket but Tests, too. Same as Hammond, who also made an injudicious comeback for his county when he was 48, when he spent 50 sorry minutes scoring seven stodgy runs. Graveney remembered that the players turned away, unable to watch. "They kept asking: 'Why, Wally, why? as he dabbed away and missed."

'Why not?' Bert would say. "Too many blokes pack up playing too early. Good cricketers. They should play a bit longer, you know? It keeps you going, anyhow, keeps you fit." Not so long ago, Bert had triple bypass surgery after a heart attack. He still came back to the club the next season. He also "bust his pelvis" when he was run over by a tractor. That didn't stop him either.

Bert has always told Sally that he'll carry on playing until he can't hit the ball to the boundary. His last game was a special match between his old club and his current one, arranged to celebrate the 70th anniversary of his debut. Aldsworth won. Apparently. Bert isn't quite sure. "There was such a lovely spread afterwards," he says, "with all the food and drink, I can't quite remember the score."

Bert scored 12. There was a boundary, of course, a "leg hit", he calls it, that fizzed off the bat and ran away for four. It fetched up underneath Sally's chair, which tickled him. "It was," he says with a childish chuckle, "really going quite fast when it got there." He's long since had to give up the fast bowling – "I overdone it a bit when I was in my 60s" – because his shoulder wouldn't allow it any more. These days he fields at slip, and "scores a few runs now and again at number four or five or thereabouts". He plays for three different teams, Aldsworth most Sundays, but Winchcombe too, and a touring side from Liverpool University, who always rope him in whenever they're down his way.

The 12 wasn't his favourite innings. That was against Badsey, a village down near Evesham. "They were a goodish team," Bert says. "Market gardeners, mostly." It was a Sunday match. "Me and another chap put on 100 together in 20 minutes." There's that infectious giggle again. "The one chap made 51, and I made 49. And at the market on Monday, somebody said to the Badsey lot: 'How did you get on on Sunday?' and they said: 'We was doing damn well, till two bits of kids come in and knocked us all over the place.' Well, they said we was kids, but I was 35." That would have been in '65, the same year Graeme Pollock took a hundred off Larter, Snow, and Cartwright at Lord's.

Unlike a lot of old hands, Bert doesn't believe that everything was better way back when, perhaps because the sun still hasn't set on his day yet. There are plenty of good young players in the villages now, he says. The difficulty is getting them to turn out.

"Village cricket now is a bit of a job. These youngsters, they're good, but if they've got something else on they'll let you down. They've got too many distractions. When I was a kid, cricket was the thing." Well, that and the weekend barn dances with the local land-girls. Bert would walk six miles a day, to school in Temple Guiton and back, thinking all the while about the wickets he'd taken last weekend, the ones he'd take on the weekend ahead.

Along with his 49, another of Bert's cherished memories is the time he almost caught out Imran Khan in a friendly. "I got my hands on it, but it just slipped out. It would have been nice to get him. But it was a good go." His team-mates forgave him. He was 71 at the time. It says something that the two moments Bert picks out of the many are the time he fell one short of a fifty, and another when he almost took a catch but didn't. That's the way Bert plays the game. The fun of it is the thing. He never cared for league cricket. "Too cutthroat," he says. "I've played in hundreds of games. And I can say I've enjoyed each and every one."

That, after all his decades in the game, is the one lesson Bert wants to pass on. "Always enjoy it. There's going to be days when you don't do so good, but you still enjoy it, so long as you support the other 10 and stop for a drink afterwards." Perhaps you still play. Perhaps you still dream of playing. Perhaps there are a set of pads and an old bat in the attic, or at the back of the coat cupboard, gathering dust. Perhaps it is time to get them out again.

The spirit of cricket isn't something which can set down on paper, and it has nothing to do with whether or not a batsman walks when he has hit it. The spirit of cricket is something you find in the company of men like Bert. He's expecting another call from the Guardian in 2023, when he reckons he'll be celebrating another 10 years of playing the game.