The Surfer

The Asian Games is a huge platform, second only to the Olympic Games, for countries to showcase their sporting talent and to win national honour and glory. The sheer emotion of any champion who hears the national anthem of his country played when he wins the gold is indescribable, and strong men (the expression 'men' being gender neutral) have been reduced to tears as the gold medal is being draped around their necks.

For the 38-year-old from Bulawayo, the prison cells, bloody wounds, alcohol-related problems, manic depression, suicidal tendencies and self-inflicted injuries of the recent past have now been replaced by a deep and sincere spirituality.

Instead of whipping up mass hysteria, the media should be asking the question: does cricket belong on the Olympic or Asian Games stage? Or will it be an imposter, as football and tennis are? An Olympic medal should be the pinnacle of your sport. If it's not, you really don't have any business being there. You can melt all the Golden League ingots in the world, and they still wouldn't mean half as much as the gold medals that Usain Bolt won in such thrilling fashion at the Bird's Nest in Beijing.

Nobody should underestimate the potential of Finn, who left Lord's for Old Trafford with the fine match figures of 9 for 187, but McGrath's record – 563 wickets at an average of 21.64 – is outstanding. McGrath's ability to take wickets on any continent, against any batsman and on any type of pitch is there in the history books for everyone to see. His record for Australia is phenomenal and he performed almost day in, day out for a period of more than 10 years. As Steven told me when I spoke to him yesterday afternoon, he is now only the small matter of 550 Test wickets away from emulating one of his heroes.

It is that naked ambition and application which England need. It is that total immersion that enabled him to make a century against Australia on his test debut last summer, an innings vital to England's Ashes triumph. His dedication to the crease is writ large, in the painstaking redrawing of a line demarcating middle stump, extending a yard down the pitch towards the bowler. The reason, to allow him to stand outside his crease in county cricket "to make the bowling faster", he says. That is a measure of how desperate he is to succeed at international level.

It is the first time I have ever seen Finn bowl live and I have been hugely impressed. Specifically, I have been impressed because he can make things happen and take wickets on a flat pitch and in batsman-friendly conditions. Finn looks to have a good brain, is mature and has good people like Gus Fraser around him at Middlesex, who will make sure he does not get carried away with his success in his first home Test. The only possible issue with Finn will be his workload - we have seen with people like Ryan Sidebottom in recent years that the extra demands of international cricket can take a toll on a bowler's body.

The current management of Broad gives us a clue as to the treatment Finn, as a 21-year-old, can expect over the next few years. Sports science tells us that young bodies are highly susceptible to strain injuries, especially when involved in something as basically unnatural as fast bowling, and it is an almost impossible balance for a captain to strike in trying both to get the required work out of his young fast bowlers and not to break them.

More disturbing for the sport, with a county cricketer recently reporting an approach from an Indian businessman worth a moral-compass tempting £5m, is that all the evidence points to large sums of money now being offered to players in the lower echelons of the game, players who are therefore more likely to be enticed. Limited-over games between English county sides are televised live in India, where vast sums of money are involved in betting on cricket. Hard though it is to conjure up the picture, a humdrum Pro40 match in front of a handful of cloth caps in Derby might have millions of dollars resting on the outcome in Delhi.

Though it has made concerted efforts in recent years to expand its horizons, essentially cricket remains a game of the old Commonwealth. As such, the ICC's members, though undoubtedly diverse, are linked by history, by culture, by language. It is a game for which people care deeply, but other than on the Indian sub-continent does not stir up fervour as soccer does. You would think that, as such, it is a relatively easy sport to run.

People might point out it's wrong for Collingwood to make a quick buck in the IPL and then sit out a Test series in front of his own fans. But, again, that is the reality of the world we live in. You can't stop the players chasing the money. The only question that matters is: how do you best manage the situation for the good of English cricket?