James Lawton: Hard times require draconian action so send for the SAS

Here is a wish list for the new sporting year. If at times it seems a touch draconian there are no apologies. Desperate problems demand hard-headed remedies.

Thus the 10 best young English cricketers should be attached to the SAS forthwith. They should serve at least a year and if this involves combat duty in Iraq so be it. We may lose a few, possibly by friendly fire, but those who survive might just one day go on to the field against Australia with a little more animation and fortitude than a tin of tomato purée.

Anti-war campaigners may consider this an appallingly callous proposal. But they should get a sense of perspective and understand that the future of English cricket could be at stake. Certainly this is true of our other national game and correspondingly tough action is much desired here.

A good start would be for certain leading football managers – including Sir Bobby Robson, Kevin Keegan and Martin O'Neill – to have explained to them all the philosophical and practical implications of holding substantial numbers of shares in the business of a top agent – one of those people who have been roundly accused of squeezing the once juicy cantaloupe of English football so hard it is no longer capable of emitting more than a few impoverished squeaks. Possibly they would submit to a rigorous programme of re-orientation in class awareness, perhaps conducted by surviving practitioners of Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution.

Ideally they would attend the sessions on a voluntary basis and in a spirit of heavy contrition. If not, they should be rounded up without ceremony and ordered to wear serge boilersuits throughout the course of their re-education.

A tough measure, no doubt, but when the chief executive of the Premiership asserts that the running of football and the shaping of its ethics is safely a matter for self-regulation, a gauntlet might be said to have been thrown down. The response should be ferocious in its outrage.

Elsewhere, a somewhat gentler approach is at this point probably appropriate. One area of valuable reflection might be in the minds of all those who – in the wake of Manchester's triumphant Commonwealth Games – voted athletics the most desirable sport for the participation of our young people. That preference may well have been also much inspired by the brilliant performances of Paula Radcliffe, a fierce anti-drug campaigner who has, against the bleakest background, conjured the glowing picture of ultimate achievement by hard work uncontaminated by chemical assistance.

Parents eager to see their offspring run in such distinguished footsteps might pause and reflect on the probability that Radcliffe just happens to be one outstanding individual of the highest moral standards who can do no more than represent herself – and not the beginnings of "closure" on the widest and deepest corruption to beset any competitive activity in the entire history of sport. A hugely popular winner able to redeem the status of athletics is indeed most welcome, but has the sport really done enough to warrant another heavy and unguarded investment of our youth? The proposition is both wild and disturbing.

England's rugby coach, Clive Woodward, will deservedly be swamped with acclaim if he finally carries his team over the suspicion that they will always slip back among the nearly men when the really big issues of international competition are settled.

None of these issues is bigger now than the monster World Cup which dominates every four-year cycle of the game and will unfold again late in the new year. No doubt Woodward's winning November campaign against the southern hemisphere nations will serve as great encouragement. But the wish here is that England's desire for the great prize which eluded them by such a fine margin at Twickenham 11 years ago does not further obscure the delicately drawn line between ambition and anything that passes for workaday morality.

No one could argue with Woodward's angrily voiced distaste for the cynical tactics of a pitifully bankrupt Springbok team at Twickenham, but less easily accepted was the speed with which the entire English rugby community clambered on to the high ground. In the light of English outrage, it was somewhat bewildering to recall that Woodward had played his captain, Martin Johnson, against Ireland just days after the big man had inflicted one of the coldest, most vicious assaults every witnessed on a rugby field.

The Springboks dourly promise a reprise of the Twickenham squalor when the teams meet up against in a World Cup game in Perth. In this situation assistance from the SAS would almost certainly be superfluous, But maybe the authorities can be brought into the violent equation. They might even get round to saying that the World Cup is the great showcase of the game's skills and movement, rather than recidivist thuggery.

In golf we can hope for the continued growth of Justin Rose, a young man who has brilliantly absorbed the lessons so often taught by outrageous celebrity. Rose was described as the British answer to Tiger Woods when he made his sensationally precocious run at the Open a few years ago. It was an unforgivable invitation to the placing of still more pressure on an impressive but still unformed talent, and this was the more so because it was encountered on the lips of such an eminent British golf figure as Sir Michael Bonallack.

After a vertiginous descent into the bad place of shattered confidence while desperately trying to justify such an airy assessment, Rose went back to the basics of his game and has come through to a new level of accomplishment. 2003 should be a good year for Rose, but that is assuming he is allowed to get on with it.

Tim Henman can go pretty much anyway he likes except for the two weeks of Wimbledon, when he becomes again the prisoner of the nation. His struggle to respond to such exaggerated expectation is now becoming poignant. Last year he was engulfed by Lleyton Hewitt, like the rest of the field. But they were allowed to go to a sporting defeat. Henman's fate was to betray middle-class England. Meanwhile, the boy grows a little older. The same cannot be said for the Centre Court. It remains as adolescent as ever. You wish the new year brings a little touch of reality. But not as hard as Henman.

For Lennox Lewis the hope remains fixed at that moment in Memphis, Tennessee, last June, when Mike Tyson lay at his feet and all that Britain's one and only undisputed world heavyweight champion of the 20th century could cleanly, honourably, accomplish had been done. He should have walked away then but as he said, so honestly, it might prove that the continued easy pickings would be irresistible. So this year he will earn another $50m or so while putting his head on the altar of easy money. The risk is that it will all suddenly go from him and he will be ambushed by the years that bring every boxer's decline. It is melancholy speculation. But around boxing, now, how do you escape it?

Wayne Rooney could easily have been a boxer. The sport is in the blood of his family. But his facility for football is stunning and perhaps the most pressing concern of another sporting year is that it remains whole in the face of instant and rampaging celebrity. We do not have so many heroes that we can afford for this one to go wrong.

Will he do that, will he be added to the forlorn and ever growing list of young footballers who have been consumed by the furies created by their first success? It is too soon to say. We just have to trust in fate – or maybe call in the SAS.