(Filed: 12/07/2003)

When the sports writer Hugh McIlvenney was in Antigua in the early 1980s to interview the great West Indian cricketer Sir Vivian Richards, he was astonished when a group of local cricket-playing urchins spoke to him in a drawling mock-Hampshire burr.

The boys were mimicking the cricket commentator John Arlott, whose broad and measured dialect had for so long tumbled from the tinny speakers of their transistor radios during the overseas broadcasts of Test Match Special. Arlott was all that they knew of England. Arlott was their romanticised Albion.

I was reminded of the great man when I ordered my pint of Pots Ale and Hampshire ham and eggs at the Cricketers Arms in Tangley. This was, as near as dammit, Arlott country. The broadcaster's home was a few miles from where my pint was brewed in Alresford (his house was a decommissioned pub called the Rising Sun) and he would have been proud of the Cricketers Arms.

The former drover's inn at the edge of the village is as English as the game itself. It is a squat, cream-painted, brick building, with a 19th-century batsman cut out in cast iron above its painted sign. The low-beamed room - designed for crouching keepers, rather than lofty fast bowlers - is littered with original cricketing pictures on the walls and copies of Country Life on the window seats.

It has a cavernous inglenook fireplace, a smattering of tables, with drawing-room china lamps plonked on them, and behind the wooden planked bar, an ancient barrel rack holding eight casks of beer, mostly from Hampshire micro-breweries.

There was a convivial atmosphere when I arrived one recent Tuesday lunchtime. A couple of regulars were at the bar, where the talk was of Wimbledon, rather than Wisden. At a table, a group of well-to-do women were shrieking with laughter about enrolling on a local belly-dancing course, and nearby there was unsuppressed fury about the hunting bill and the unspeakable Blairites who have pursued it.

On a hot summer's day, there are, I imagine, few more quintessentially English moments than a pint of Pots at the Cricketers Arms. It is the actualisation of an Antiguan fantasy. Only the Arlott drawl is missing.

• Cricketers Arms, Tangley, Hampshire (01264 730283).