Ashes leg: 12-13: v Aus Youth Brisbane 15-18: First Test Brisbane

Ashes leg: 12-13: v Aus Youth (Brisbane); 15-18: First Test (Brisbane); 22-25: Second Test (Sydney); 26: Return to England.. The golden future of English cricket was being put through its paces in Park 25 off the Adelaide ring road. Occasionally, the man who has been charged with transforming these chosen few into world-beaters, or at least Ashes winners, or even Ashes contenders, barked an order. Mostly, though, Rodney Marsh just watched with- out moving his eyes from the action.

They have worked hard and they have worked often.Marsh, in his innumerable interviews, has been quick to point out how they would be prepared to walk over hot coals to play for England. Indeed, the fast bowler Jimmy Anderson and the off-spinner Gareth Batty were plucked from the Academy to play for England in the VB one-day series before Christmas Ander-son has stayed with the senior squad. The Academy, perhaps, was not meant to work so quickly.The inference has been that too many of the inaugural bunch were unprepared to do many of the hard yards This year’s crop do not know what soft yards are It is a mixed bag of young cricketers. There is a difference between 19-year-olds and 24-year-olds, between Chris Read and Kyle Hogg, for example.They need different things, they approach life in different ways.

But the Academy could be the making of them both, to name but two. It is clearly already beginning to achieve what it was set up to do. It is turning out better men as well as better cricketers.Read has already played for the full England team in both forms of the game. He was the big thing when he was first picked in 1999, but then it all went horribly wrong.

After his tour of South Africa that winter he was quietly forgotten.”I was England’s next wicket-keeper but when I got back I had a pretty moderate season,” he said. “Looking back now I didn’t know what I had to do to play for England. I first started examining myself and my approach to the game in 2001. But the Academy has topped that off.”Read, a spectacular wicket-keeper who has learned consistency, can thank Marsh for his place on the Academy and a possibly big future. There was a sense that he had been quietly dropped from international plans. But Marsh saw something in him and spoke to him often.”I met him last May and talked to him at first as a fellow wicket-keeper,” Read said. “As the summer wore on he mentioned that I could get a lot out of the Academy It has been massively important.