Marsh in charge of mission impossible

What do you do when beating Australia looks increasingly like becoming a once in a lifetime occurrence? Easy, you steal their means of production, which to put a face to the Stakhanovite, is the director of their Cricket Academy, Rod Marsh.

Actually make that ex-director for Marsh, who has presided over the pre-eminent breeding ground for Australia's best cricketers for the last 10 years, has joined the old enemy. In a move the England and Wales Cricket Board is citing as a "coup," the 53-year old Marsh has agreed to head the soon to be minted ECB's National Academy, a scheme still undergoing a troubled period of gestation.

But an Aussie stooping to help the Poms? Ian Chappell, Marsh's first Test captain, would be apoplectic at the thought of it. But if you can understand the ire from Down Under, what about here in Blighty? Should Aussie indignance at losing a favourite son be our joy, or a concern that the future of our cricket is in the hands of a man who once branded all county bowlers as pie-chuckers?

Perhaps understandably, not everyone in England shares the ECB's excitement over the appointment and, in a radio interview yesterday, Mark Ramprakash felt that talented young cricketers would better respond to former England players like Mike Gatting and Graham Gooch.

But such thoughts are mainly the knee-jerk reaction of the man at the coal face. The trend for outsiders brought in to run sport over here may appear to be reaching epidemic proportions, but there is nothing faddish about it. Appointments have only been made after great deliberation and all bar the churlish can see that Sven-Goran Eriksson and Duncan Fletcher have improved the lot of their respective teams in the short time they have been in charge.

Most sea changes, in any case, need an outsider's perspective. Often, change for the better requires a cultural shift, which former players either cannot see, or hold too dear to dismantle. Bryan Robson was a fine footballer and a good lad who liked a drink (something Marsh, a 40-can-a-flight man from Sydney to Heathrow, was not impartial to) but those days have passed on.

Under Marsh, the Australian academy's record for producing Test players is legendary. Glenn McGrath, Brett Lee, Justin Langer and Shane Warne all attended, though Warne was expelled though indiscipline in 1991. Of course, cream rises to the top far more easily in Australia's hot and astringent sporting landscape, so spotting the best players is not as difficult as in England where the desire for success is diluted by other things.

Marsh, whose credentials as Test player and coach, are impeccable, says he needs three years to identify a base of 20 players, and five to seven to turn them into top-quality international players. His greatest obstacle to achieving that end will not be the lack of talent, but the comfort-zone thinking that afflicts most young players. For them, it is a sponsored car and adulation among a small social circle, not a regular Test place, that are the height of ambition.

Whatever the hurdles, results are required. In a fit of quota-spouting more suited to Stalinist Russia, Sport England, which distributes lottery money and is currently funding the ECB's World Class Plan to the tune of £2m per annum (£550,000 a year of which helps fund the Academy), have stipulated that England must be the number one side by 2007.

They must also win that year's World Cup, so Marsh, whose annual salary will be £85,000, at least knows his mission, however impossible that might seem in the midst of another Ashes débâcle.

The "raw product" Marsh and his assistant coach, John Abrahams, will be handed to work with this October, will be 16 cricketers between the age of 19 and 23, slightly older than his former charges in the academy back in Adelaide.

The first intake will be selected by the current England selectors as well as the ECB's performance director, Hugh Morris. As most are already likely to be first-class cricketers like Chris Schofield, Nicky Peng and Chris Tremlett, the A teams of the last decade will become obsolete.

If planning permission is forthcoming, they will eventually be based at Bisham Abbey, but while that is being finalised – a decision should be known by next January – they will spend the winter at the Australian academy in Adelaide. There they will spend four months hardening body, mind and technique.

They can have no better teacher. To a certain generation, Marsh will have appeared uncouth and ruthless. Yet beneath the walrus moustache there has always lurked a good egg with an abiding love for the game. Eighteen years after hanging up his gloves, it is this this last trait which has seen him leave his life running a winning stable to relocate amongst the also-rans.