It was concerns over phishing online, rather than fishing outside off stump, that nearly scuppered Caleb Falconer’s hopes of a contract in The Hundred.<\/p>\n
At the time the Middlesex batting all-rounder did not have an agent, had not yet made a professional appearance and was thousands of miles from home, away with England at the Under-19 World Cup in Zimbabwe and Namibia.<\/p>\n
But the teenager had a hunch he should pick up the phone to his father.<\/p>\n
“I actually gave him a call and said, ‘It might be worth chucking my name in’ for The Hundred auction,” Falconer told BBC Sport.<\/p>\n
His father Stuart – a coach, a major influence on his son’s career and, for one day only, became his unofficial player representative.<\/p>\n
There was just one hitch. The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) was not quite convinced he really was Falconer’s father.<\/p>\n
“They had to get back to him to find out if he actually was my dad and it wasn’t just a hoax email,” Falconer laughed.<\/p>\n
“It was a bit of a process and it took him a few hours to sort it. I’ve no idea what my dad wrote!”<\/p>\n
A few phone calls, emails and a presumably an identity check later, Falconer senior had managed to get Caleb on to the auction list. <\/p>\n
It turned out to be quite an important email, not least for his son’s bank balance. <\/p>\n
Several months later, his name was being fought over by two Hundred franchises, with Southern Brave eventually winning the bidding at \u00a355,000.<\/p>\n
“My mindset was that even being in the auction was a really cool achievement,” Falconer said.<\/p>\n
“To get picked up, and also getting a bit of a bidding war, that was unbelievable.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was concerns over phishing online, rather than fishing outside off stump, that nearly scuppered Caleb Falconer’s hopes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":732794,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-733294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-cricket","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=733294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733294\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/732794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=733294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=733294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=733294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}