The picture-postcard ground, home of Barkby United, had an idiosyncrasy: four (or was it five?) mature trees - two limes, at least one oak - rooted imperturbably inside the boundary rope.

Local rules, I was told, called for these full-canopied sentinels to be treated, in effect, as supplementary fielders.

You could even be dismissed (theoretically) if you smote the ball against a trunk and thence into the hands of a loitering opponent. 

I presume this would go into the scorebook as “boled out”. (Boom, boom).

I thought this was wonderful - after all, the conditions were the same for both teams, so why insist on a tree-less playing arena? – so much so that it got me thinking about standardisation in sport.

As with railway gauges, some degree of standardisaton is obviously essential: international football simply wouldn’t work if goals were eight yards wide in England and, say, two in Italy.

But I have always thought there was something special about sporting events that use the natural environment as their arena.

I generally prefer the Tour de France to the velodrome; cross-country/Marathon running to stadium athletics; river rowing to races using man-made facilities.

(I can’t make up my mind about golf, which combines the natural surroundings – nowhere more so than in its Scottish birthplace - with extreme artificiality.)

Some games, indeed, were shaped more or less entirely by the places that spawned them.

The court used for Eton fives, with its step and buttress, is said to be modelled on part of the exterior of the college’s chapel; the Eton wall game seems, so far as I can see, to be the consequence of someone’s desire to create a game designed specifically for that very particular space.

This suggests to me there is something satisfyingly innate about sport and the human race: put a group of people (or at least posh schoolboys) in an environment and, if basic needs are met, they will devise a game, just as some say gamblers would bet on anything.

To some extent, I suppose, my prejudice against standardisation is a consequence of the fetishisation of the concept that the ingress of money into sport has made possible.

Lord Killanin, the late former International Olympic Committee (IOC) President, complained in his Olympic memoir, My Olympic Years, how one-time rowing federation boss Thomi Keller had pitched his demands for “very expensive” rowing and canoeing facilities very high.

“Trying to get the location exact to avoid wind giving some competitors an advantage is difficult, if not impossible,” Killanin wrote.

Actually, I can empathise with Keller’s insistence if the prevailing wind at a given site nearly always blew from the same direction, threatening to reduce races to a lane-draw lottery.

But I struggle to see white-water canoeing as anything other than an extravagant indulgence when practiced on an artificial course rather than a natural river.

Yes, I no doubt fail adequately to grasp the perspective of the full-time athlete who has expended four years’ worth of blood sweat and tears on a stab at Olympic glory, only to risk being thwarted by the necessarily inconstant conditions prevailing on a natural stretch of white water.

However, I don’t believe many top-level competitions are decided on just one run.

Bad luck evens itself out over time.

And in any case, one of the standard justifications for sport is that it can help you to deal with life; and bad breaks are part of life.

I was, needless to say, heartened when open water swimming was introduced at the Olympics in the Beijing 2008 Games.

I would be very much inclined to give the sport of surfing a shot on the Olympic programme – but I would like it to be stipulated that natural waves, not artificial ones, be used wherever possible.

My strong preference for natural arenas is also related, I don’t doubt, to the simple fact that sport’s unpredictability is a big element of its appeal for me - as for millions of others, but not, I suspect, for many of the corporate paymasters who have pumped ever-increasing sums into the sector over the past two or three decades.

Companies who sponsor sport by and large want their names to be associated with winners.

It is plainly much easier to achieve that when we know who, barring miracles, is going to win.

In my bones I must admit that I don’t really approve of systems in which the fastest qualifiers are allotted the most advantageous lanes in subsequent rounds of a race.

If you are going to handicap, I would rather you tried to apply horseracing principles by penalising the fastest qualifiers to enhance unpredictability.

I acknowledge, though, that this mainly happens because horseracing, unlike say swimming, is a betting medium; it would also be hopelessly impractical.

Ultimately I suppose your attitude is likely to be conditioned by whether your priority is to identify the best at a given sporting discipline at a particular moment of time, or to provide raw excitement.

I would argue, though, that true champions are those who excel in a range of conditions over an extended period of time.

And to single out those champions, an excessive preoccupation with standardisation is not necessary.

A Sir Garfield Sobers or Charlotte Edwards would not allow the odd tree dotted around the outfield to obscure their genius.