I have always been a bit of a Walter Mitty character. I can rarely sit down alone and watch a sport without going into an imaginary world where I am competing at the very top providing performances of derring-do.

It got me thinking of what separates the great performers from the ordinary mortals.

Have you ever played in a cricket match where the two teams have played the most incredible game. Perhaps it is a cup semi-final or a league decider or even a final itself but there has been nothing to choose between the teams throughout the whole match. There are evenly balanced in every way and the game is finely poised going into the last few overs. No-one can tell who is going to win. Except!!!..

One team is used to winning and picking up winners medals and the other whilst pushing so very hard always seems to come down on the losing team. Why is that? Why does one team always manage to win? Because they believe they will. I always find it fascinating the power of the psyche.

You need to have a positive mental attitude, work hard at your sport and have a high degree of natural talent to be a success.

However it seems to me that to be a truly great all rounder you just need to be naturally gifted. So who was the greatest all rounder to play cricket?

Most people who were lucky enough to see him play would answer Garfield Sobers. He could bowl left arm quick, swing and spin. He also could bat and field brilliantly. Stories of his prowess are legendary not least being the first to hit six 6's in an over.

In my lifetime I was lucky enough to witness the four greats who were all playing at the same time: Ian Botham, Kapil Dev, Imran Khan and Richard Hadlee. To a lesser extent you could add Viv Richards who was a very capable off spin bowler and Malcolm Marshall who was a more than handy batsman all playing in the same era.

Later we had Wasim Akram, Jacques Kallis and Shaun Pollock. These guys were all exceptional cricketers. Pollock not only could bat and bowl he also managed to play hockey for South Africa as well. Talented boy indeed.

What if someone had way more talent than that? Imagine a supreme sportsman who could put his hand to any sport and do it at the top. Step forward cricket's greatest ever all rounder, Charles Burgess Fry.

CB Fry was good enough to captain England. Good enough to do it for 6 years and remain unbeaten. At County level he scored over 30,000 runs at an average of over 50 in an era when averages were generally lower than today. He also managed 94 hundreds including an unprecedented 6 in a row. Even when he was getting on in years he was so good he was asked to captain England again when he was 49 years old. He topped the first class batting averages on six different occasions.

Not bad for starters. Highly intelligent, as well as winning a scholarship to Oxford University he got a First Class honours in Classics and was known as the master of witty banter and a brilliant conversationalist.

Indeed it was at Oxford that Fry's sporting prowess became legendary. He won 12 different sporting Blues and managed to play rugby for Oxford, the Barbarians and Blackheath. Not content with being accounted a fine boxer, swimmer, tennis player, golfer, javelin thrower and skuller, CB Fry had a go at the long jump and broke the world record. Not bad without any training and the cigar he was smoking was still lit. It was a shame the Olympic Games were on at the same time as the England cricket tour to South Africa especially after winning the long jump and 100 sprint at the first International athletics meeting before the tour.

Fry also played football but being a frightful snob called it Association Football. He played professionally for Southampton and Portsmouth as they were close to home. Not content with that he managed an FA Cup Final appearance and got a full cap for England against Ireland.

Fry was a teacher by profession and also a director of a training organisation for the Navy as well as a journalist. He founded his own magazine, and became a best selling author and novelist.

However despite all the sporting successes in his younger days his later life was littered with a series of near misses. He went to Hollywood and had a go at making it as an actor but it never happened despite having film star looks. He also unsuccessfully stood for Parliament on three different occasions.

His great friend, Sussex and England colleague Ranjitsinhji later became the Jam Sahib of Nawanagar and asked Fry to write speeches for the Indian delegation to the League of Nations. It was here he was allegedly offered the throne of Albania. Albania's royal family were of German extraction and had gone off back to Germany, leaving them with no representative in Geneva. They were looking for an English gentleman with an income of £10,000 a year. Unfortunately for Fry he was always notoriously short of money.

Despite of all his genius Fry found the burden of expectation hard to live with. He had a nervous breakdown before he left Oxford and at 26 he married Beatrice Sumner which proved to be a disaster. Sumner, 10 years older than him and with a scandalous past was a cruel and domineering woman. Her lover Charles Hoare bankrolled the three of them.

Eventually the mental health problems recurred in the 1920's. His wife made him thoroughly miserable and he became anxious and excitable. All of his friends at Oxford went on to become great successes and into positions of power. Fry had neither money nor position. In India in the late 20's he had a major breakdown becoming paranoid with increasingly eccentric interludes. He developed a horror of Indians including his true friend Ranji who had supported him through the years and Fry was never really the same again.

In later life he recovered sufficiently to write a regular column for the Daily Express and joined the Test Match Special team to commentate on the radio. Despite all of the eccentricities, the nervous breakdowns, the fatal flaws of judgement and emotional weaknesses CB Fry will be remembered as one of England's finest ever cricketers and its greatest ever all round sportsman.