PETER MOORES will miss his old balcony overlooking the county ground at Hove. It has been his perch through some momentous years at Sussex. Even now, a second XI game is capturing half an eye. “Who’d be a professional cricketer?” he sighs as an appeal worthy of Shane Warne slices the damp air, signalling perhaps the end of a young tyro’s dreams or the final collapse of an old pro’s career. Although Sussex are still fighting to win the County Championship and the totesport league second division, thoughts are already turning to next season.

After 20 years, Moores, too, is moving on. “Player, vice-captain, captain, coach, cricket manager and director of cricket,” he says. Any longer on the south coast and he will run out of fingers to count the jobs. In a fortnight he moves to Loughborough to become head of the National Cricket Academy, a home- grown replacement for Rod Marsh.

The authorities could have opted for another West Australian, Tom Moody, a strong candidate. Instead they went for Moores, who learnt the game playing against his brothers in the back alley of his house in Macclesfield and is enshrined in the history of Sussex as the mastermind of the county’s first championship in 114 years.

You can see the qualities that persuaded the interviewing committee to opt for Moores. For one, he knows the county game inside out, knows intimately from his own time as a wicketkeeper- batsman the insecurities and the mentality of the county circuit, the feeder pool, as he puts it, for the England squad. But he is every inch the modern coach, inventive and open-minded.

In the middle of 2003 Sussex were riding high, but Chris Adams, their captain, was struggling with the bat. In the end, with Moores’s help, he went to the nets and hit ball after ball until he felt right again. He made a century the next match and never looked back.

For Moores, victory in the Ashes reflected well on the rising standards of not just English Test cricket but of the tiers below. No longer, he says, need we look to the southern hemisphere to tap the game’s barometer of excellence. “We can be more bullish about what our players are doing,” he says. “They can say, ‘Hey, I’m an Englishman, I’m a good cricketer and I’m going to get into that England team’, rather than feeling like a second-class citizen to an Australian cricketer. Our young cricketers can have a belief that if you’re good enough, you’ll be identified as a player, you could go to the academy and then if you work hard enough and are lucky enough, you could get into a very good Test team. All those things are very exciting.”

As head of the academy, Moores will be the link between Duncan Fletcher, the England coach, and the rest of the game, finding and improving young players such as Alastair Cook and Ravinder Bopara, who both took centuries off Australia for Essex, patching up and reviving internationals on the fringes of the full squad and working with the next generation of schoolboys when time permits.

“I will be judged on a couple of things,” he says. “One is making players better. The other is finding the right raw material and creating the right environment so players can flourish. Whoever comes to the academy, I’d like them to go back to their counties and say, ‘It was fantastic, I learnt a huge amount’.

“You can judge the strength of an Australian team by who is not playing as much as by who is. Darren Lehmann and Michael Hussey are fantastic cricketers not in the Test squad. The key for England is to make sure there’s no complacency, and the way to do that is to provide competition for places. Can you get another fast bowler ready or another batsman? That’s my job, to give Duncan options.”

The relationship between Fletcher, the taciturn Zimbabwean, and the ebullient Moores will be critical to England’s wellbeing.

In its way, Moores’s transformation of Sussex from bottom of the second division to county champions within three years mirrored Fletcher’s achievements with England. A club in turmoil at the turn of the century will be left with trophies in the cabinet and, in players such as Michael Yardy and Matt Prior, a healthy legacy of talent.

At the age of 42 Moores is ideally positioned to succeed Fletcher as England coach when the time comes. First he has to prove his worth. “I’m just very proud to have been given the opportunity to make a difference,” he says. “I’m really looking forward to the challenge. Times are changing in English cricket and it’s a good time for me to have a change too. If I stay here any longer, I’ll have to become the groundsman.”