Hollywood May Come Calling For You Derek!

Special delivery, sign here please,” says the postman when you open the front door. The bloke looks vaguely familiar, and you say: “Anyone ever told you you look a bit like Joe Root?” And the reply comes back: “As it happens, I am Joe Root.”

- Martin Johnson

Wind the clock back a few decades and this is not an impossible scenario. In the days before central contracts, the IPL and the Big Bash, the majority of professional cricketers had to find themselves a winter job at the end of the season. Or else sign on for the dole if bowling all those overs had left their feet too blistered to lug sacks of mail down garden paths.

It was the same for footballers before Sky’s TV money made searching for out-of-season employment unnecessary for anyone with a higher calling than the Hartlepool United back four. Just imagine, after opening your door in the middle of winter to find Root handing you a parcel, the summer would be ushered in by the chimes of the Mr Whippy ice cream van, with the cones and the 99s being served by Wayne Rooney.

A handful of cricketers were talented enough to switch sports at the end of a season, as with Leicestershire’s Chris Balderstone in the Seventies, a No. 3 batsman who was a good enough footballer to play in the top division for Carlisle United, and Graham Cross, who played cricket with Balderstone in the summer as a middle-order all-rounder, and football in the winter for Leicester City in the old First Division.

Balderstone famously left a Leicestershire match against Derbyshire at Chesterfield in 1975 to dash up the M1 to play an evening kick-off game for Doncaster Rovers, before strapping the pads back on next morning to turn his 51 not out overnight into a century.

In a slightly later Leicestershire side, two other cricketers who played alongside Balderstone spent somewhat contrasting winters. Les Taylor was variously a miner, postman, van driver, and a refrigerator repair man, while his new ball partner Jonathan Agnew spent two winters as a sports presenter for Radio Leicester.