Champion Barker proves he flicked the right switch

Warwickshire's successful paceman turned his back on professional football

Swing the changes: Keith Barker (left) celebrates winning the Championship with fellow paceman Chris Wright (Getty Images)

When the first champagne corks popped and Jim Troughton, the captain of Warwickshire, let out his roar of joy and triumph as he lifted the County Championship trophy above his head, Keith Barker had all the confirmation he had ever sought that none of the rewards which can come with professional sport would ever beat the emotions he was experiencing at that moment.

Barker, 25, used to be a footballer, which is not a unique CV entry among county cricketers even though the days of dual professionals have long gone. Joe Gatting, the Sussex batsman, was a striker with Brighton & Hove Albion before deciding to follow his uncle, the former England captain Mike, into the summer game.

The difference is that the club who saw Barker as someone who might one day be a star in their shirt were Premier League champions at the time. Barker was nine and he had joined Blackburn Rovers, the Lancashire mill-town club who were fulfilling a fantasy lavishly funded by their millionaire owner, Jack Walker. They had become a team that suddenly boys from Darwen, Rawtenstall and Accrington aspired to join, dreaming they might be the next Alan Shearer. Barker was the envy of his mates.

He did not become the next Shearer. Barker looked on from the youth-team minibus as Roy Hodgson arrived from Internazionale and would train with the first team under Graeme Souness and Mark Hughes, but he never played a senior game despite a fine goalscoring record with the Under-18 and reserve teams. Blackburn sent him to Belgium on loan and then to Rochdale, where he made 12 appearances in League Two and scored his one goal as a pro in the Johnstone's Paint Trophy.

"If it had worked out, maybe I could have been making big bucks as a footballer," he said in a quieter moment before Warwickshire's crushing defeat of Worcestershire last week, in which as a left-arm swing bowler he took five wickets as the would-be party poopers were skittled for 60 in their first innings, and another three in the second. "But I don't think about it now. I'm not really bothered about what has happened to Blackburn.

"I keep an eye on how a few players are doing, guys like Junior Hoilett and Martin Olsson, Matt Derbyshire, Paul Gallacher, Jemal Johnson. But I don't keep in touch with anyone, really.

"To be honest, I think cricket has made me a better person. Football can make you kind of arrogant, that's what it is like. You are taught from 12 or 13 not to care about anyone else but yourself. You don't know who you are half the time.

"I'm not saying all footballers are like that," he added. "There are some genuinely nice people in football, but it is dog eat dog. But on the whole cricketers are much more rounded people. I was shocked when I came into cricket to see first-team players talking to second-team players. At Blackburn, that just didn't happen."

When Rovers released him, five years ago, he did not give up immediately on football. He attracted interest from Bury only for the manager, Chris Casper, to be sacked between his trial and his interview. A move to Ireland was curtailed because of injury. "Northwich Victoria offered to take me on trial but said they wouldn't be paying me," he said. "I didn't want to be doing with that but fortunately I got this chance with Warwickshire."

To those close to him, it was what he should have been doing in the first place. He is from a cricket family. His late father, Keith Snr, played for Barbados before settling in Accrington as a Lancashire League professional. Clive Lloyd, the former West Indies captain, is his godfather.

"I was at Blackburn from the age of nine or 10 and for six years I was combining football with cricket at Lancashire. Cricket came more naturally to me when I was younger but when I was 15 or 16 I was enjoying myself more playing football and I just went with my gut instinct at the time. Lancashire did try to get me on a contract when I was 13 but the board did not allow it. Then, literally three days after I signed a contract at Blackburn, I got a call from Lancashire wanting to talk to me about a contract there.

"But I felt I should honour the contract with Blackburn and decided I would commit myself to football and work hard to get better. It ended up not the right decision but thankfully I've got myself back into cricket."

He did that by maintaining his links with Enfield, his father's club in Accrington where, as Warwickshire's director of cricket, Ashley Giles, explained, he was being closely monitored by a former Lancashire coach turned TV commentator, Accrington-born David Lloyd. "Bumble said he knew Keith's father from league cricket and thought he might be worth a look at," Giles said. "We got him down for a trial and within a couple of games, in one of which he got a hundred, it was clear he could bat really well regardless of his bowling, and we signed him as a batsman.

"But Graeme Welch, our bowling coach, has done a lot of work with him. He has changed his action from a slingy one-day bowler to coming more over the top with the ability to swing the ball back into the right-hander and away from the left-hander. He is now a decent all-rounder."

Last season Barker made two first-class centuries but this year his emphasis has switched to bowling. His first-class wickets tally for 2012 is more than double last year's and with Chris Wright, a combination thrown together by accident after injuries to Boyd Rankin and Chris Woakes, he has bowled Warwickshire to the title. His eight wickets at New Road gave him 54 for the Championship season, with Wright, who took nine, earning 58.

"It has been fantastic," Barker said. "The only trophy I won at Blackburn was the Under-18s League Cup. To be playing another sport and actually winning a trophy like this and achieving all I have done this year – it's something I never thought would happen."