ALL ROUNDERS

It seems odd, now that we are evidently at ease with a sporting world in which football and cricket (and tennis, I suppose) seem to be played non-stop for twelve months a year, to recall that there were times when a chap could play two games (most usually football/cricket) to the highest professional level. In the 1950s the soccer and cricket seasons did not usually seriously converge, though there must have been many occasions when the last dying embers of the cricket season overlapped the early season football training. And vice-versa. Yet there were men who achieved it.
One of the most glamorous in a sporting sense was Denis Compton, of Arsenal and Middlesex. He appeared in a dozen England friendly soccer matches during the War, as well as turning out for the Gunners, and playing cricket. Arthur Milton (Arsenal/Gloucestershire) was another, while Kent County Cricket Club had on their books at least four Charlton footballers - Ufton, Leary, O'Linn and Lucas - while a fifth, Stewart, was at Surrey along with Chelsea's Ron Tindall.
Willie Watson (wing-half/batsman) and Brian Close (Arsenal/Yorkshire) were other such stalwarts, but in general this was a dual ability which, by and large, died a lingering death in the 1970s. Ian Botham, I recall, had a go at football late in his career. Inevitably, though, the all-rounder philosophy died when training began to be stepped up, football and even cricket became much more athletic and thus more demanding, and fixtures and playing seasons began to inflate out and beyond their historical boundaries.
One all-rounder (in a dual-sports sense) I do remember seeing play was Chris Balderstone, the Leicestershire cricketer, who once scored a not out half-century for his county, played in a Football League match in the evening, and then completed his century the following morning. I saw him play soccer when Norwich City had an away match at Carlisle.
It was a bitterly cold and blustery day, and temperature levels were not helped by the fact that, in those days, at least, you could sit in the Carlisle grandstand and watch sheep grazing on the distant, misty hillsides.
The strength of the wind turned the game into a bit of a lottery, but in the second half it all went against the Canaries when Balderstone took over. Playing for Carlisle on the left-wing he soon found that, when deep in the Norwich half and particularly when Carlisle won a corner, he could clip the ball high into the wind and then watch it swerve and turn to the consternation of the Norwich defenders who could not find the right position to deal with it. There was a lot of Norwich embarrassment, and I think the Canaries lost.
'He played it like a spin bowler,' one of the City players said to me later. He had, too. And in an odd sort of a way it seemed to bring the entire dual-sports thing full circle.
POSTSCRIPT: Delighted to see that Flanagan & Allen played for Liverpool recently. It reminded me that Norwich once had two defenders, Allcock and Brown, whose names regularly sent visiting Fleet Street journalists into paradoxisms of delight and spawned countless aviation jokes. Best of all, though, was the one-time Charlton back line which included Fish, Costa, Fortune. Can anyone beat that?