A hero.

England heroes were hard to find last Sunday.

The nation turned its eyes to its football team in search of heroics and found only mediocrity. We sought inspiration and got errors and tattered dreams. Those big-talkers and big-earners transpired to be big frauds. Big girls' blouses.

The Great Wayne Rooney whose only memorable input to the 2010 World Cup was The Great Sulk after the Algeria game. David "Nice hair, shame about the near-post" James. Those celebrity grotesques, John Terry and Ashley Cole. When it came to the crunch they failed us. Miserably. All through the finals and most emphatically as soon as the going got tough.

Yes you had to search hard for heroes last Sunday. But I found one. And, what's more, a true hero.

True heroism cannot be applied in a sporting context, of course. Afghanistan - that's where the heroes are. And other spots around this troubled, gormlessly-governed planet. And as I listened to the radio on Sunday, travelling north between Warwickshire's games at Nottingham and Chester-le-Street, and heard in the same bulletin the latest from the World Cup and the war in Afghanistan, my thoughts turned to Percy Jeeves. And my car turned off the A1(M) and headed for Hawes.

Percy Jeeves played 50 matches as an all-rounder for Warwickshire. In two seasons he took 199 wickets and scored 1,204 runs. A spectacular hitter (he once smote the ball over the Edgbaston pavilion) he bowled fast-medium, moving the ball both ways. His final game for Warwickshire brought match figures of 40-12-88-7 against mighty Surrey. Six weeks earlier, England captain Pelham Warner predicted a brilliant future for Jeeves.

The trouble was, that Surrey game was in September 1914. The First World War was underway. Jeeves joined up and went into the 15th Battalion Royal Warwickshire Regiment.

On July 22, 1914, Percy Jeeves was in Warwickshire's team at Edgbaston on the final day of a draw with Northamptonshire. On July 22, 1916, aged 28, he was in C Company of the 15th Royal Warwicks, sent to support a hopeless offensive on High Wood. The wood was, indeed, high. On a hill populated by well-established and well-armed German soldiers. On the sloping, coverless cornfields below there was carnage.

As Percy Jeeves disappeared without trace that savage night, he has no grave. So one cannot get closer to the spirit of this brave, talented and, by all accounts, charmingly self-effacing man than to visit Hawes. It was in that small Dales town that the Dewsbury-born player made his cricket reputation, aged 21-year-old, at Hawes CC, a country house team for whom he left his job as a railwayman in Goole to become cricket professional, playing at weekends, maintaining the pitch and working on the estate during the week. And it was there in the heart of Wensleydale that Warwickshire CCC secretary Rowland Ryder, on holiday in the summer of 1910, heard of a hugely-talented local cricketer.

So there I was on June 27, 2010, driving through windy country lanes to find Hawes. And I'm in luck. The Stone House, where Jeeves was employed, is now the Stone House Hotel, easy to find and well worth finding, tucked elegantly into a hillside overlooking the little town. I look down and drink in the view. Magnificent; a sweeping, wooded river valley and there, nestling among stone walls, a cricket ground. THE cricket ground.

I go to it. Hawes CC still play there but are away today. I climb over the tiny gate and walk out on to a field all but unchanged in a century. The hills tower all round. Rabbits play on the outfield. A fieldfare perches. A cockerel crows next door. I look up and see the grey walls of the Stone House and imagine Percy walking the half-mile down on match days to prepare the wicket and then play brilliantly on it.

I stand on the square and imagine this fine young player in 1909 taking 65 wickets at seven and a half runs apiece with a grace which was, four years later, to make such an impression on writer PG Wodehouse when Warwickshire played at Cheltenham that he later immortalised the name in the famous butler.

And as the soft breezes stir in this spot, just as they did 100 years ago, I picture Jeeves, red-faced and smiling, celebrating another wicket and then see him again, face full of fear and bewilderment as he blunders towards the guns at High Wood. And I pay silent homage to a true English hero.