The 22-year-old John Carruthers spent much of his first year in the Bradford Cricket League (BCL) bowling in the Spen Victoria nets at the pro, Vinod Kambli, and his mate, Yorkshire’s first-ever overseas player. “I’m going to say I got Sachin out loads of times,” he says, looking back to that summer of 1992, “because when you hit it in the air in nets, it’s always to a fielder, isn’t it?”

Having started out at Birstall in the Central Yorkshire League, venturing Down Under for three winters at Claremont-Nedlands in Perth under Dermot Reeve’s captaincy, Carruthers only spent that one summer at Spen before pivoting to Hanging Heaton.

It was there that he made his name, becoming just the 13th bowler to take 1,000 BCL wickets since reliable records began in 1940.

He bagged 73, 76 and 71 respectively in his first three years, that latter haul – along with the contribution of the team’s third-highest run-scorer, a young VVS Laxman – helping Hanging Heaton to the BCL title in 1995, the club’s third.

The young Carruthers had vague aspirations to play full-time (“although deep down I knew it would have been a struggle”), and Reeve got him trials at Warwickshire, where he had the dubious pleasure of facing a young Allan Donald in an intra-club game. However, a broken arm sustained at work denied him a second XI outing at Old Trafford and things fizzled out. Where most high-end clubbies lack a yard of pace for the professional game, Carruthers, rather disarmingly, admits “my problem was I couldn’t really swing it”.

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