CRICKETERS throughout the country are holding their collective breath today. Not until Lord MacLaurin and Tim Lamb stand up at Lord's tomorrow will we have a complete picture of the major changes in the game planned for next season and beyond. If even the details of the Chancellor of the Exchequer's budgets are sometimes leaked it is not a huge surprise that some of the main points - the buzz is there will be a championship in three groups and a national one-day league with two divisions - have seeped into the public domain.

If these changes are confirmed, however, they cannot be seen in isolation. It will be how they relate to county second eleven, minor county, university, club and school cricket which will really decide whether all that is planned is to be for the ultimate improvement of the England team, which is the prime objective. Of course the changes to county cricket are the ones to catch the eye; but the single most important element of the master plan will be what is decided for the young professionals and the best young amateurs.

It bears repetition, for the umpteenth time, that the essential English conundrum is why we produce many talented teenage cricketers, the great majority of whom never fulfil their potential between the ages of 19 and 25. One little clue both to the problem and the solution may be this: one young professional all-rounder would have taken the field yesterday for the 14th day running, and the 31st time in 34 days, had he not injured himself late on the 13th day just when his efforts had earned him a recall to the county team.

Here is just one young player who desperately wants to succeed but whose keenness for the game might have been dulled for a while by that sort of programme even if his body had taken the strain. Simply too much of a good thing to enable a good thing to flourish.

TALKING of young cricketers, few issues aired recently in this column have attracted so full a postbag as the news that Radley have called off all cricket, rugger and hockey fixtures with Marlborough for three years following a contentious match in June and a history of over-excited contests. The waters are best left to settle, and objective evidence cites faults on both sides.

The Warden of Radley, Richard Morgan, who took the decision to have a cooling-off period, stresses that what has happened in recent rugby matches, and fears of what might have happened had two over- motivated scrums clashed next term, were very much part of the equation.

The best cricketing solution, however, has already been tried with success by other schools, not least Sherborne, whose long-time master-in-charge, the pre-war Oxford blue Micky Walford, comments: ``Some modern school coaches are obsessed with unbeaten records. The answer is to limit the number of overs allowed to the side batting first - say 55 in a 100-over match. Exciting draws are then still possible but the deadly draw is eliminated.''

ADAM HOLLIOAKE has followed a long line of Anglo-Australians in county cricket and on Thursday he will follow one or two of them into the final England eleven. He will be closely watched by the Oxford captain of 1953, Alan Dowding, who offers an interesting theory on the particular aspect of the series which has turned the tide Australia's way again: the close catching.

Schooled in Adelaide himself, Dowding suggests that it is winter experience in rugby union and Aussie rules football, plus perhaps baseball, which makes the Australian catchers generally more reliable than their soccer-playing English counterparts when the crucial chances come. Mark Waugh, he contends, held two head-high slip catches at Headingley partly because it came naturally to him to get his head below the line of a fast-travelling ball, whereas Graham Thorpe's portentous miss was the result of obscuring his vision at the last moment when he put his hands in front of his eyes.

Good ball-playing skills come from games played in the winter as well as from specific cricket training. When it rained at Worcester last Friday the Kent team went off under John Wright to have a long game of football; but when the Australians want to let off steam in the same way on rainy days it is the torpedo-shaped Aussie rules ball which appears on the outfield: it is, therefore, the catching skills as well as the lungs which are exercised.

Agility too. More and more emphasis is being placed by enlightened cricket coaches on anything which will develop not just hand-to-eye co-ordination but speed of reaction. Mark Alleyne, Gloucestershire's successful captain this season, is one player who has improved himself by applying methods of ``SAQ'': speed, agility and quickness.

Ignoring the question of whether there is any difference between speed and quickness - mere sports jargon, surely - there was no doubt much to be learned at the 1997 SAQ Symposium, held in Manchester this weekend and addressed by, among others, Lancashire's coach Dav Whatmore.

Agility needs honing. I can remember in my impatient youth getting irritated by elderly fielders who missed catches or who failed to anticipate or stoop. In equally impatient cricketing old age I now get even more annoyed with myself for exactly these failings. John Arlott expressed the syndrome poignantly in his poem about an old man watching the village play from a bench on the boundary:

He leaps once more, with eager spring
To catch the brief-glimpsed, flying ball
And quickens to its sudden sting:
The brightness dies: the old eyes fall,
They see, but do not understand,
A pursed, rheumatic, useless hand.