It is generally accepted that you do not have to have competed at the highest level to coach there. But what if you have never played professionally? At the beginning of December, the ECB appointed David Parsons to one of the most senior roles in the English game, director of the National Performance Centre at Loughborough (NCPC).

Parsons will arrive in Bombay today in charge of an England Lions team who will compete in next month’s Duleep Trophy. If the elevation of Peter Moores to head coach caused some to splutter that the former Sussex wicketkeeper and coach had never played international cricket, the rise of Parsons, a club off spinner, is more remarkable.

Ric Charlesworth, the Australian coach and former hockey international, turned down the job and Parsons beat off, among others, Mike Watkinson, the Lancashire coach. But Parsons, 40, has been a coming man for years. He was on the first Level 4 course, with Moores, and was the ECB’s spin coach for 18 months, the last six spent as acting performance director at the NCPC.

Born and bred in Birmingham, Parsons was part of a successful West Bromwich Dartmouth team in the Birmingham Premier League, but he stopped ten years ago. “I started coaching in 1991, with a view to trying to improve as a player,” he said. “I went to work in financial services at NatWest, decided that wasn’t what I wanted to do, went to Wolverhamp-ton University to train as a teacher and used all my spare hours coaching at Warwickshire.”

When he graduated, they offered him a development job. The ECB made him a national coach in 2000 and he has not looked back. “I think it can be an advantage [not having played professionally],” Parsons said. “To acquire knowledge and experience I have to use other people’s knowledge. I don’t take any ego into those relationships. The other advantage is I developed skills I would perhaps not have been able to develop if I spent those years playing cricket.”

The disadvantages are more predictable. “I think back to a Level 3 that I ran. I was doing a spin module and I looked around the room and there’s people like Tom Moody, John Bracewell and me talking to them about spin bowling,” Parsons said. “I found it quite a difficult experience.”

The proof to any sceptics will be in results. Parsons is armed with Monty Panesar, who was dropped from England’s one-day squad but will head to New Zealand for the Test series. The prospect of him bowling in India in tandem with Adil Rashid, the promising 19-year-old Yorkshire leg spinner, is exciting.