Australian cricket is underpinned by two strong brands that sell beer and whisky © Getty Images

Anyone with an interest in Australian sport, not just cricket, will be digesting the detail of the government-commissioned Crawford Report which was handed down yesterday. Basically, in a very simplistic summary, the report attempts to prioritise where the limited pool of government funding should go. Some Olympic sports - the niche ones that don’t attract many participants or win medals - will probably see a cut in funding while other popular sports (like cricket), which enjoys huge participation, should continue to receive generous funding.

As a cricket fan, with young children on the verge of entering the system, the Crawford Report’s probable bias towards cricket is likely to benefit my own selfish ends. My oldest child, aged six, has just begun his cricket career for the Ferny Fireballs under-eight team and will no doubt benefit from continued grassroots investment. His passion for the game is unbelievable – broken light bulbs, damaged walls and a room full of cricket posters attest to the reach of the clever marketers who are charged with the task of seeding the next generation of young Australian cricket fans. “Good on ‘em” I say. I can think of nothing better than a cricket-crazy household, just to ensure that my wife can't change the TV channel without a howl of protest!

What will be interesting to see is whether the funding is truly directed to the grassroots of the sport or whether it ends up being siphoned towards the elite end of the pyramid. A sport like cricket already has far too much money at the top of the tree and I’m hoping that the Australian government will go to great lengths to ensure that the lion’s share of the funding is directed at young kids. Sponsors and TV rights will keep the big boys in champagne and caviar for some time to come, but the real battlefront in a country like Australia, where cricket competes ferociously with so many other sports, is to win the loyalty of the juniors.

It’s never going to be an issue in the subcontinent; cricket is likely to be No. 1 for many years to come and it’s unlikely to be threatened by any other sport. If Australia is to remain competitive in this market, it is essential that the juniors, young boys and girls exactly like my children, are afforded the facilities, infrastructure and coaching that attempts to bridge the vast gulf in the sheer passion for the game in South Asia. We’ll never match the unbridled love of the game that I’ve seen en masse on the maidans in Mumbai or the laneways of Colombo, but if there’s no money invested in grassroots cricket, that gap will continue to widen.

Australian cricket is generally run efficiently with innovative marketing campaigns and a good structure to encourage participation in those early years. Initiatives like the All Stars versus the Australian XI game this Sunday are clearly aimed at getting young people interested in following the national team. Personally, I don’t much care for the manufactured glitz, music and hype that these sort of joke games seem to specialise in but that is not the point. The marketing men are not trying to woo people like me. They are targeting young families, women and potential fans who need convincing that the ‘product’ is exciting enough to compete for their entertainment dollar. That’s what the sponsors want – bang for their buck to allow them to keep investing in the sport. Fair enough, too.

Nonetheless, I thought it was in poor taste to receive marketing communication, aimed at my six-year old, promoting the All Stars Game to this audience with a very overt advertising message from the main sponsor, a prominent Scotch whisky brand. My son is just about at the age when anything connected to cricket is processed through adoring eyes. His questions last night left me in no doubt that he was trying to make sense of this brand placement. Fortunately, he is young enough to believe white lies but it won’t be long before he understands that Australian cricket is underpinned by two strong brands that sell beer and whisky. That is the reality of the modern game - rich players and comfortable administrators have every reason to be happy with this relationship but it does them no credit to (perhaps unthinkingly and without malice) be so clumsy with their promotional campaigns.

I just hope that the Crawford Report takes these factors into account when deciding how that money is to be spent in cricket. If it's spent at the local club level, helping tireless volunteers like the Club President to run a junior club on the smell of an oily rag, it will be money well spent. I’m ever-so-slightly uneasy though about government funds being spent at the top tier of a sport that so overtly sleeps with brewers and distillers while the very same government is pouring billions of dollars into trying to patch up the damage to a society that is being torn apart by drugs and alcohol. When those marketing messages invade my child’s domain, disguised as a promotion for something he loves so dearly (cricket), it makes me wonder if we’ve got the balance quite right. He'll grow up soon enough. Too soon. Can we just hold on to his innocence for a few more years please?

Despite a surfeit of cricket, I sense a slight ‘flatness’ on the world circuit right now. In fact, that's probably the exact reason why there seems to be a lack of spark. On many levels, cricket seems to be full of contradictions and confusion right now.

The once-mighty West Indies arrived in my home city, Brisbane, today. Their arrival barely rated a mention, such has been their fall from grace in recent times, not helped by the uncertainty about whether the star players would tour or not. Any team that boasts the batting explosiveness of Gayle, Chanderpaul, Sarwan and Bravo is worth paying the entrance fee to watch but if early ticket sales are any indication, the Gabba staff can expect a quiet shift at the turnstiles. Ironically, the main attraction may end up being the least flamboyant batsman in the squad – hometown boy Brendan Nash who is the least unlikely Calypso King in every respect.

Even the Australian team, shorn of it’s marquee stars of yesterday, crippled by minor injuries and in transition, is struggling to capture local imagination. The great irony is that Ashes tickets for this identical fixture in 12 months time are already in hot demand. No wonder Sir Viv is worried about the great legacy he left behind him in the halcyon days of the West Indian dynasty.

When it comes to injuries and player fatigue, the fans too seem fatigued. It seems that no amount of support staff and hi-tech equipment (physiotherapists, trainers, doctors, exercise scientists, ice baths, compression clothing etc) can arrest the attrition rate of minor niggles and injuries. Some of these complaints may look trivial and soft to old-timers who claimed to have played through more serious pain for the pride of wearing national colours but it is the modern way. They clearly play a whole lot more cricket these days, that overload may be too much for tired bodies and there’s no doubt that the contemporary cricketer will not often play through pain. Perhaps he is not even allowed to. Sports medicine hasn't yet paid huge dividends for the spectators who want to see their heroes on the park and not on the bench or on the beach.

'Player fatigue' is the latest buzz word and there is little doubt that it is a factor. Yet, the fittest and richest cricketers of all time, prepared to hire themselves out as mercenaries for any paymaster, seem to be forever unable (or rested) from what used to be the pinnacle of the game – international cricket. The West Indies are clearly the best example of that. At a time when the ICC is flogging the international game to death and player payments are soaring, it’s hard to reconcile the contradictory shouts of “too much money, too little money, too much cricket, more cricket please”. No country is exempt from that confusion.

Someone like Michael Clarke is an example of one of the few whose position is consistent on this issue – his fragile back and a visionary manager have mapped out a long-term position that places country and body before yet another hired gun contract. Then you’ve got guys like Gayle, Bravo, Flintoff and Pietersen, allegedly patriotic but forever unavailable for national duty due to injuries or franchise commitments.

Pakistan too cannot be left out of any conversation when it comes to confusion or irony. The smiling Younis Khan is either the captain or unavailable. Mohammad Yousuf is either banned or likely to be skipper. Their ‘home’ games are anything but, hardly the fault of the cricketers or administrators though. How long can their long-suffering and passionate fans keep the faith?

India, usually unbeatable at home, beaten comfortably by a young Aussie team without any of the jewels that adorn the Indian crown. I’m still struggling to understand how a team comprising Sehwag, Tendulkar, Dhoni, Gambhir and Yuvraj can possibly be beaten in home conditions but a quick look at the bowling attack hints at the real reasons why. The local IPL franchises, playing in familiar conditions and with the pick of the international players, fail to qualify a team in the semi-finals.

In the ultimate stroke of irony, at a time when some players who want to play representative cricket are being rested, Andrew Symonds, he who cannot bring himself to cope with the spotlight of fame, preferring beer over Gatorade, fishing nets over cricket nets, happy to walk away from an international career when others are killing for the opportunity, is invited back to play for his beloved Queensland Bulls. The scene of his reincarnation? A Town Like Alice!

To cap it off, England have just shown us they can play ‘power’ cricket after all in their Twenty20 international in Johannesburg. It’s all starting to go Irish……

	Can Joe Denly do the job Marcus Trescothick used to? © Getty Images

One of the great puzzles about South Africa since re-admission is why they have performed so poorly against England. The last time England toured, in 2004-05, England brought the side which won the Ashes a few months later and may just have had a slight edge which they duly converted to a series win, but on every other occasion South Africa's team has been obviously miles better - until you look at the scoreline and find that if they managed to win at all, it was only by the odd Test, and that they even contrived to lose in 1998. In one-day cricket, at which South Africa are known to be good and England known to be hopeless, the score between the sides in the 2000s is 10-all with one tie and two no-results.

I have no wish to know why South Africa underperform against England -- and would rather no-one found out, because the consequence has been fascinating cricket with ding-dong battles and it would be a shame to dispel the magic.

And although it would be amazing if the ODI series which is about to begin will consistently emulate the last match these sides played, at Centurion a few weeks ago in the Champions Trophy, we can hope.

As an exhibition of 50-over cricket, that was probably the best game of the tournament. Entirely against the trend of performances going back as long as one can usefully remember, England batted positively and effectively throughout, with a text-book rocket boost at the end of the innings courtesy of Eoin Morgan. South Africa's gallant reply was led by Graeme Smith's century, which was as epic as Tendulkar's hundred against Australia on Thursday, with the same heartbreaking result. It was one of those games neither side really deserved to lose but someone had to.

I'm hoping that the one-day series will be played as that game was. In particular I want to see England taking that aggressive approach with the bat. I want to see more England batsmen playing like Bangladeshis, hitting out as often as possible even if they get out while doing it. I'd prefer it if they didn't lose their wickets quite as quickly as Bangladeshis, but it's the thought that counts here.

Their performance in the first warm-up game against Boeta Dippenaar's Eagles is therefore generally encouraging. Only Joe Denly and Paul Collingwood failed to deliver, and Wright, Broad and especially Morgan had strike rates well over 100. (Wright's was higher, over 200, but Morgan played the more substantial innings, starting well before the end-of-innings charge.)

I hope Denly starts to do better soon, since he is the new England recruit who most fascinates me. He has not so far achieved much in the way of scores but he does something which very few England batsmen do, which is advance down the wicket to turn fast bowlers' good length balls into half-volleys and tee off in the early overs. It's not the only way of scoring runs at the top of the order, but it is the most effective demonstration that the batsman is intent on dominating the bowler – and that kind of intent has been missing without trace for years from England's one-day side. He is also a superb fielder in the deep: in that game against South Africa he scored only 21 runs, but he took two catches and saved a good couple of dozen runs in the field.

The likelihood has to be that England will fail more often than not by taking the aggressive approach in the short term. But they aren't going to get better at playing the aggressive game by going defensive as soon as anything goes wrong: they have to keep trying until they get it right. Denly as much as anyone, and if he breaks through and starts recording the big scores, we will at last have found someone to do the job Tresco used to do.

	Getting run out is a habit Mohammad Yousuf cannot seem to shake © Getty Images

If you watched the first ODI between New Zealand and Pakistan sitting somewhere in Pakistan, you would have heard a collective national groan when Pakistan’s total was 57 for 2. At that point, Mohammad Yousuf tapped a ball straight into the hands of short cover and took off for a single. That’s “short” cover, mind you – meaning that the fielder was well within the circle and ideally positioned to block the single. Nor was the fielder some uncoordinated slack. Yousuf has picked out the spry Martin Guptill, who nailed the stumps at the bowling end with a direct smash.

The groan preceded the run-out, because we all understood in a flash what was about to happen. The one person who appeared not to have grasped the moment, from the looks of it, was Yousuf himself.

The theory of running between the wickets is straightforward, and it has not changed in a hundred years. “One point in which many otherwise excellent cricketers fail is in the matter of judging runs,” wrote Ranjitsinjhi in The Jubilee Book of Cricket, published in 1897, anticipating the likes of Yousuf by over a century. The general idea is to play the ball into a gap and call your partner. If you play the ball towards a fielder, then the fielder should be some distance away for you to risk a run. Your vocabulary should be limited to “yes”, “no”, and “wait”.

Yousuf’s interpretation of running between the wickets represents a variation on this theme. His baffling strategy is to play the ball straight to a close-in fielder and take off. His vocabulary appears to consist of “yes”, “no”, and “wait” and “let us discuss when we meet in the middle of the pitch”. The result has been enough heart-wrenching run-outs to leave permanent psychological scars on an already jolted fan base.

A run-out is such a needless death. Why a highly accomplished batsman would keep throwing away his wicket like this beggars belief. It is clear, though, that it is a habit he cannot seem to shake. With Yousuf, this suicidal act has happened so often that you keep dreading the imminent whenever he is at the crease.

The typical scenario is a full-length delivery pitching just outside off. Yousuf bends forward and taps the ball towards cover or cover point. His action ends up almost being a lunge, in which Yousuf’s weight shifts so far forward that the process of standing up forces him to take a stride. The act of playing the stroke and setting off for a run merge into a seamless continuum.

Normally, a complex mix of variables goes into the decision of whether or not to run. Shot trajectory, field placement, fielder quality, consent of the non-striker, and indeed even the match situation enter into the calculation. In Yousuf’s case, it seems, the only real consideration is how far forward his centre of gravity has shifted. Now that I’m already afoot and out of the crease - he seems to be thinking - I might as well go for a run.

Out of 222 completed ODI innings, Yousuf has been run out 38 times, which amounts to 17% of all his dismissals. Put another way, every 6th dismissal for Yousuf is a run-out. If you want a comparison, this figure is more than twice the rate for Sachin Tendulkar, for whom only every 12th ODI dismissal is a run-out. The best way to master any endeavour is to learn from the experience each time something goes wrong. Yousuf has had ample experience in making mistakes while running between the wickets, but the only mastery he has shown is in refusing to learn from them.