KEVIN SHARP became my hero 21 years ago at Scarborough. It took him two balls. In July 1976 he opened the batting for Yorkshire 2nd XI against Warwickshire 2nd XI. He was 17 years old. The first two balls of the match were wide half-volleys. He drove them both for four, presumably because they were wide half-volleys. It seemed then that batting was not a matter of complexity or thought, but of natural response.

His love of playing was innocent and obvious. He walked out to bat as if he would have preferred to run. He was the only player I've ever seen who was so engaged in events that he made backing up into a spectator sport. He seemed to embody a Yorkshire way of playing, the mentality of `You bowl it and I'll hit it', the Yorkshire of Darren Gough before Gough was invented. Watching Kevin Sharp play in 1976 made you want to run up on deck and throw your hat in the air.

Within two years Kevin Sharp was more than just my hero. In 1977 he captained England Young Cricketers against Australia in two one-day internationals. He was the highest scorer for England in both matches: 107 at Arundel, 40 at Lord's. The only other centurion in the two matches was Geoff Marsh, who went on to play 50 Tests for Australia and is now their coach. At the end of that summer Sharp won a Winston Churchill Scholarship, which enabled him to play grade cricket in Perth. In 1978 he was again captain of England Young Cricketers, against West Indies. In the first `Test' he scored 96 to win the match. In the second at Worcester he scored 260 not out. Mark Brearley, who played in that match and had played with Sharp for Yorkshire Schools since the age of 15, thought it was the most remarkable innings he ever saw: `The rest of us could barely cope against the West Indian bowlers, but Kevin destroyed them. It was a innings of total command in which he showed that he was too good for the rest of us.' It was this innings that seemed to define him as the future.

Yet that future never quite happened. He was not a failure by mortal standards. He played for Yorkshire from 1976 to 1992, and was a capped player for ten years. He scored over 10,000 runs, he made 11 hundreds. But that does not really add up to what was hoped for him, not least by me.

Twenty-one years later Kevin Sharp is Shropshire's cricket development officer. He has just give up playing for Shropshire, for whom he had turned out since being released by Yorkshire. So my hero is, in playing terms, no more. This seemed a good moment to talk about his career and find out where that future went.

 Kevin Sharp, like many northern children, spent his summers at his father's cricket club, Woodhouse. He played his first adult match at the age of 11 for them Leeds Police and, thereafter, was always young in teams. Despite that, he often captained the age-group sides he played for. UntiI the age of 18 he never had any fear of failure, because he had no reason to fear that which had never existed. His recollections of playing for England Young Cricketers speak of that confidence. In the one-day match at Arundel against Australia he managed to stir up their opening bowler with such a combination of strokeplay and verbal provocation that before the end of the first over he received a beamer. Sharp guided it over second slip for four.

The double-hundred for Young England sings, the same song. West Indies had batted until tea on the second day of a three-day match. Their hope was to bowl England out twice in four sessions. In the next three sessions Sharp scored 260 out of 409 for 7. `I felt on the day as though I could have scored a thousand,' he said `After tea we could have batted on for me to get 300. But Bruce French had been hit by a bouncer from Winston Davis, and Graham Dilley said he fancied getting his own back. It seemed like a good idea, so we declared.' Dilley bowled very fast, scared a few people and took three wickets before the game was drawn. Sharp was happy with the decision: presumably because he thought he could get 300 some other day. He never did. All the other characters in his story went on to play Test cricket.

 THE AUTHOR John Claughton opened the batting for Oxford University and Warwickshire in the 1970s. He went on to become a Classics teacher and master

 IN THESE early days Sharp had no real doubt that he too could play for England. This was not vanity, but a view shared by most of those who had seen him play. In his early first-class career there were moments which supported such aspirations. In 1977, on a fast and unreliable Abbeydale Park pitch at Sheffield, Yorkshire lost by an innings to the Middlesex of Daniel, Selvey, Edmonds and Emburey. Five of their batsmen were injured in the match. The 18-year-old Sharp scored 23 out of 163 in the first innings and 56 out of 171 in the second. Wisden said he had `a marvellous temperament and a fine range of shots', The Cricketer compared his off-side play to the young Nell Harvey's. And yet he didn't score a first class hundred until 1980, or win his county cap until 1982, six years after his debut. In none of his first seven years did he play a full season, or score 1000 runs, or average more than 30.

By 1980 the self-belief which had once been his greatest strength was gone. `I scored my first hundred that year against Middlesex, but I still wasn't playing very well at the beginning of the season. I wasn't enjoying it, I didn't really want to play, and my concentration was poor. It didn't help that my private life was in a muddle. After all, I was still only 21, even though I had been playing for five year. I explained the situation, and the management suggested I should take a month off. I'm not sure now that this was the best solution. I probably for someone actually to ask me what my problem was. The next thing that happened was that it was in the newspapers that I was suffering from depression, that I was resting on medical advice. I spent my time feeling that everyone thought I was a head case. It took me years to get over this. I didn't play well again, or believe that I could play, for another five years after that.'

The Yorkshire dressing-room had always been a place which, in the nicest possible way, encouraged self-reliance and strength of character

The figures bear out Sharp's assessment. After his `rest' in 1980 he didn't play for Yorkshire's first team for over a year. He was capped in 1982, but more to stop him leaving than to reward his achievements. Only in late 1983 did he establish himself in the side with two hundreds, and only in 1984 did he have a season commensurate with his ability. He scored 1445 runs at an average of 39. He made three centuries, two of them against Derbyshire. The second of these, 173, made `in late August, was then the highest score of his first-class career. Without the injured Geoff Boycott, Yorkshire got full batting bonus points for the first time in the season.

At that moment Sharp was still only 25, the England`A' team was just being invented, and it was still possible that he could be more than just a county cricketer. He was newly married and happy. It seemed that all manner of things would be well. He started 1985 with a big score, but then something happened in his private life which left him shattered. He finished the season with an average of 23, and the moment was gone. By 1986 he had recovered his equilibrium and confidence, but in late July he had his toe broken by Terry Alderman, and potentially Ms best season ended there. He played on for four more seasons, until, via the captaincy of the 2nd XI, he was creased at the end of 1992. In all that time, Sharp says with real feeling, he continued to try his best, but he found playing the game a burden which progressively wore him down.

In the search for the enemies of promise, it would be easy for Sharp, or anyone, to line up the usual suspects from Yorkshire. Sharp was not the only young Yorkshireman of his regeneration who didn't fulfill his potential. Bill Athey and Jim Love were slightly older, Ashley Metcalfe a little younger. The pressure of expectation upon them, that they might bring a return for Yorkshire to a new Golden Age, was massive, and perhaps insupportable. When Sharp first came into the side, the club itself was inconsistent at best, a failure at worst. He was first given an extended run in late 1977, and Yorkshire lost five out of six of those matches.

The natural: Sharp batting for Yorkshire and (right) as he looked in 1991, his penultimate year with the club

The politics of Yorkshire cricket were often worse than the performances, and generated much greater interest. While Geoff Boycott outlived and out-performed all his heirs, there was constant bloodshed on the matter of the captaincy and governance of the club. It was a world of instability and uncertainty: in 1981 Yorkshire had four captains, and probably one or two others with opinions on the matter. In one season, 1982, Chris Old passed from club captain to the sack. Sharp was an observer of that warfare, and perhaps even a casualty. In 1983, at the Cheltenham Festival, he was batting with Boycott when Ray Illingworth, then the captain, tried to suggest to Boycott that he should proceed more quickly. According to different sources, these instructions were either obeyed, or misunderstood, or ignored. Whatever else happened, Sharp was run out soon after, for 121.

In such circumstances, there was probably little time spent on helping the young players, not least because the Yorkshire dressing-room, full of stories of Ticker Mitchell and Close and Trueman, had always been a place which encouraged, in the nicest possible way, self-reliance and strength of character. So it may have been that Sharp did not receive enough personal guidance, despite the fact that, as time went by, both his method and his approach changed. Perhaps his own apparently self-assured nature had discouraged interference.

However, Sharp himself offers an account which is strikingly devoid of blame of others, or justification of self. He barely refers to those who captained Yorkshire in his time, and he doesn't always know who was captain when. That may not be surprising when lie was skippered in the space of ten years by Messrs Boycott, Hampshire, Old, Hartley, llingworth, Bairstow, Carrick and Moxon. Rather, he thinks that his greatest strength, the ease with which, as a young man, he could play the game, may have been his greatest weakness. Thus, when things got difficult, be didn't have the means to sort things out. It is difficult when instinct, which has been so successful, is no longer enough. After his unthinking superiority as a young player, he found first-class cricket problematic, because he had to make decisions, not just play.

`In an attempt to become a proper county cricketer,' he says, `I tried to stay in, and so I became less positive.' Thus, by trying to do the right thing, he forfeited his strength and the possibility of failure began to lap over the threshold of his consciousness. `Later on, I opened the batting on a Sunday for several years, and I found that less difficult, precisely because I just went out and played. But even that didn't do me much good. Sunday games in front of big crowds were very demanding, physically and mentally. I was a terrible player on a Monday in the Championship: I was so worn out I never got a run.'

This consumption of energy didn't help either. The boundless enthusiasm and the wonder of playing in his early days became boundless anxiety. Perhaps he would have coped better with the continual demands of playing and the attendant expectations if, after all, he had relaxed more at the non-striker's end.

 Sharp also admits that he was not strong enough, or hard enough, to separate his life from his playing. There are some people who are so single-minded, so self-assured that they don't let events in their private life, or anything else, get in the way of their cricket. I suppose that often they are the ones who succeed I was never like that. I just couldn't go out and bat and forget what was going on off the pitch.'

 Kevin Sharp's career may speak, above all, of the very fragility of promise. It shows how long a road it is from potential to achievement. It takes not only talent, which I don't think he lacked, but also good fortune and extra-ordinary strength of character. It may be that Kevin Sharp, playing for another county at another time, would have succeeded. It may be that, with some luck in his private life, things could have been different. But it may also be that what made him heroic to me at 17 was not enough to make him the great player I wanted him to be.

None of this is much of a problem for Kevin Sharp these days. When he was released by Yorkshire, he took his advanced coaching certificate and was appointed for six months at first by Wrekin Council in Shropshire as their cricket development officer. In 1993 he coached the England women's team to victory in the World Cup. By 1994 he had raised the sponsorship from British Telecom to make the post in Shropshire Permanent. Now, as the county's cricket development officer, he is responsible for the whole of Shropshire cricket under the new dispensation of the ECB.

He has no envy of his contemporaries who became Test players, because he is happy in what he does and in his life. He has never lost his love of the game, even if the playing of it wore him down. These days he administers youth cricket and coaches throughout the county. He now has the novelty of enjoying the success of others and drives around Shropshire looking at the trees. Perhaps this, after all, is his promise fulfilled.

`Sunday games were very demanding mentally and physically. I was a terrible player on a Monday in the Championship'

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