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The idea that this cricket World Cup has failed to capture anyone's imagination founders somewhat around the reassuring figure of Richie Benaud. He spoke with measured approval this week about, among other things, the final stages of South Africa's game with Pakistan, which he commentated on for the BBC last Saturday (''A wonderful finish. The biggest jail escape you've ever seen''); about Pakistan's Shoaib Akhtar (''There's no reason why he can't go on to be one of the great fast bowlers if he keeps his head''); and about New Zealand in their role as spoilers.

``I nominated them before the tournament as dangerous and the best bet for value,'' Benaud said. ``I think they were about 16-1 at the time.'' Did he have any money on them? ``No. Never bet on anything that can talk.''

All this with eyes slightly narrowed in shrewd appraisal, and in the legendary Benaud voice: the whistling 's', the precise consonants. ``I think that's correct,'' Benaud said at one point during our conversation. No one says ``correct'' more correctly.

We had met at the smart hotel which is Benaud's base during the World Cup and which is handy for Lord's, not so far removed from the Oval, well-placed for roads north and, most importantly, around the corner from a particularly good Italian restaurant. David Gower commended the hotel to Benaud and, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, above the desk in the room we were using was a painting of Gower at the crease. Benaud stood in front of it and observed it drily. ``I'm not sure I would want to sit here, typing away, with that looking down at me,'' he said.

Benaud, who is 68, was wearing a tie, a blazer, a creaseless white shirt, pressed slacks and loafers with chains. It was nine o'clock in the morning, but he had already been at work a while, sending an e-mail to the chief executive of France Cricket - the optimistic body of which Benaud, who has French ancestors, is a patron - and dealing with his correspondence, which is copious. Recently a nine-year-old sent him a video of his bowling action for Benaud's comment which, doubtless, was forthcoming.

``I was very disappointed with the way England played in this tournament,'' Benaud went on. ``They didn't seem to me to be pushing on with their run-rate in the matches they won. And in the match against India, I simply couldn't believe what they did to Neil Fairbrother, who is correctly regarded as one of the best limited overs players in the world.

``I was watching on the television. Thorpe was out and the whole thing was dependent on Fairbrother. About 20 minutes later, they showed a shot of Fairbrother doing his laces up and I thought, 'hello, Neil. Has everyone forgotten you?' Flintoff was out there, whacking away, Hollioake went out: and instead of letting Fairbrother guide them, all of a sudden they're all gone and Fairbrother's left standing at the other end. I just thought that was thoughtless cricket and for that I think you can only blame The Management, which consists of the captain and the coach.''

Against the tournament, he would only say he thought the amount of lacquer on the white ball had spoiled things slightly for batsmen. He added that ``the fellow who runs the ball manufacturers'' was ``very cranky'' with him for mentioning this. ``For years now,'' Benaud said, ``I've been saying they should go to NASA and come up with the same sort of white paint they put on the nose cone of the thing that's coming back from Mars. So the ball would stay brilliant white all the time.''

People stop him in the street a lot, Benaud says, and unburden themselves of their animosity towards the one-day game with its heathen clothing and its upsettingly non-red ball. But they find no ally in Benaud who is, as he says, ``not against any sort of change and innovation'' and has no problem whatsoever with the pyjamas. ``I couldn't care less what they wear, so long as I'm able to recognise the player. They can have names and numbers on their backs: they can have them on their fronts if necessary.

``When World Series cricket started, it was written that if God had meant cricket to be played in this fashion, he wouldn't have made cricket balls red. That's stretching the point a little bit - but that's the sort of comment you get. One-day cricket started the year I finished as a player, and that has always been a great disappointment to me.'' Benaud alluded at this point to an article on one-day games by Sir Donald Bradman in Wisden in 1986. ``There's no point in saying I feel exactly the same way as the Don does about it, but my thoughts have been there since 1963. It's very important that cricket keeps up with the pace of modern-day life.''

As a player (spin bowler, big batsman, captain of Australia) Benaud missed out on one-day cricket and also aeroplanes. His final tour, in 1961, was the last an Australian side undertook by boat, and reading his autobiography, Anything But . . . one is struck by the sheer length of the team's absences from home. Just seven weeks into Benaud's first marriage, he set off for an eight-month tour; one week after the birth of his first son, he left home for five months. ``I should think it was much harder for my family than it was for me,'' Benaud said. ``I was away playing cricket for Australia and they were at home.''

The marriage did not survive these absences. ``It put a lot of pressure on a lot of people. But there was nothing that could be done about it: that's the way cricket was at the time.''

Periodically in his career, Benaud would make things interesting for himself by sustaining a ghastly injury. Anything But . . . documents these. There's the index finger snapped while attempting to catch a lofted drive. There's the fast ball that caught Benaud in the mouth, breaking into 27 pieces the set of dentures he had worn since the age of 15. (A calcium deficiency had troubled the growth of his teeth.) There are the near-constant complications with the skin on his spinning fingers, which can only be prevented from cracking and yawning open by regular applications of oily calamine lotion and boracic acid powder. Just for good measure there's the painful and entirely non-cricket-related adult tonsillectomy at the age of 30.

But the worst injury occured when Benaud was 18 and playing for New South Wales in Melbourne. He was struck on the forehead by a bouncer, just above his right eye. The ball broke the bone. The wicket-keeper later maintained that he had never heard a more sickening sound on a cricket field. The blow was so vigorous that the bruising eventually extended down as far as Benaud's neck. ``It was a bit dicey,'' he said, as if referring to a small tumble on the stairs. He added that his most vivid memory of the occasion is the sight of the MCG gatekeeper looking down with an entirely unmoved expression as Benaud passed beneath his eyes on a stretcher.

The only visible evidence of the surgery Benaud underwent is a line, of the kind glasses might make, across the bridge of Benaud's nose. The man's willingness to face another cricket ball - and within a year - testifies, at the very least, to a thoroughly settled sense of purpose. The consequences of another blow to the same area didn't bear thinking about; so Benaud didn't think about them. ``I didn't ask the doctors; the answer could have been anything.''

In 1956 (the year television opened up in Australia), at the conclusion of an Ashes tour in England, Benaud took a three-week sports broadcasting course at the BBC. He had already worked, between cricket matches, as a journalist in Australia, bridling at his editor's suggestion that he might be happy with a sports column and asking to work the crime beat. Now he tailed Peter O'Sullevan at Newbury; he listened to Dan Maskell and Henry Longhurst and generally did the groundwork for what would be his post-playing career. At least with commentary, I suggested, there was less chance of getting smacked on the head. ``Well,'' he said slowly, ``it depends what you say, really.''

At this summer's Test matches, Benaud will do his talking on Channel 4 who, amid much clamour, lifted the television rights recently from the BBC. ``I was surprised,'' Benaud said. ``But it's a challenge for a 68-year-old.'' News of this rights heist by a commercial channel agitated cricket fans. The possibility seemed to hover of a jazz-up for cricket, of an attempt to work the sport over for the approval of a younger crowd. There were fears that the screen would be thick with cartoon ducks; that where once we had heard from Benaud, now we would hear from Caprice and Robbie Williams.

At home in Australia, Benaud and his second wife, Daphne, who has run his freelance business for the last 32 years, wondered if it might be time, as he put it, ``to re-group''. The British press, meanwhile, was launching a vigorous 'Save Richie' campaign. I asked Benaud what he made of that. ``I thought it was very good newspaper work,'' he said.

The panic abated slightly (as Channel 4 surely knew it would) with Benaud's appointment to the presentation team. Here was at least some guarantee of continuity, a stout branch for nervous traditionalists to cling onto. (Murray Walker served much the same purpose by moving to ITV along with the Formula One franchise.) Meanwhile, commercial television has nothing with which to surprise Benaud. For 20 years he was worked through the Australian summers with Channel 9 - a commercial channel, perhaps the world's most innovative sports broadcaster, and the home, in fact, of the cartoon duck.

``A lot of the resistance to ads on television comes from newspapers,'' Benaud said. ``If the editor said he was going to cut out 50 per cent of the advertising in his newspaper, I would be more inclined to listen.'' What's more, Benaud added blithely, ``there are people in Australia who prefer the ads to the chat between overs.''

It would come down to match coverage, Benaud said, and the match coverage would be good. ``A cricket match is just a cricket match and you can't televise it any differently from a cricket match.''

You would back Benaud to rise to whatever this new challenge threw at him. Cricket being a gentlemanly and considerate game, the first ball bowled to Benaud on his return to competitive play following that terrible blow to the head, was a head-height bumper. Benaud hooked it for four.