You know you are doing something right when Gordon Brown gets in touch. Sir Alan Sugar, Susan Boyle and the England women's cricket team have been recent recipients of the Prime Minister's attention as he hopes, as all politicians hope, that proximity to excellence or popularity will act as a lightning rod and transform their own situations. Let's face it, when you are surrounded constantly by incompetence, greed and self-preservation, excellence must be an alluring concept.

Excellence is what the England women's cricket team are all about and excellence should be acknowledged and applauded no matter where it is found. I am not entirely sure whether England can lay claim to absolute supremacy in any other sport (cycling, rowing, tiddlywinks?), but I'm sure that if we can, it is a small list. The England women's team - Ashes winners, 50-over World Cup winners and now World Twenty20 winners - are, undoubtedly, the alpha females of their sport.

Not that their achievements have guaranteed universal acceptance. A first-rate sports writer of my acquaintance was asked recently by his newspaper to write about women's cricket and he declined on the ground that he wrote about sport, and women's cricket did not qualify. He probably refuses to do the washing-up or change nappies, too.

But the world is changing and women's cricket has certainly changed. Fifteen years ago women cricketers could not have shared the stage with the men, as they did during the recent World Twenty20, because the comparison would have been too embarrassing.

We men are open-minded types, for the most part, but we want to watch something that equates to the game that we know. Before the ECB made England women's cricket a priority, that was not always the case, but I defy anybody to have watched the semi-final at the Brit Oval between the England and Australia women's teams and not have been captivated by the skill levels on show or the drama that ensued.

When, after Sunday's final, Charlotte Edwards, the captain, was asked about her male counterparts, an important barrier was crossed. When England had been knocked out of the 1996 World Cup, I can remember various newspapers trying to get Karen Smithies, the women's captain at the time, to give the men some advice. She was not shy. But they were not interested in what Smithies really thought, more that they could write a story embarrassing the men's team through Smithies.

Equally, when I was caught on the boundary - well, 20 yards in from the boundary, to be precise - by a player called Emily Drumm in a charity match in New Zealand in 1997, the papers went into overdrive. “England's captain dismissed by a woman!” You would have thought I had been caught with my pants down, smoking a joint, such was the disapproving tone of the comments.

But when Edwards was asked for her thoughts on Sunday evening, those asking the questions were genuinely interested in her view. The questions were not designed to embarrass Paul Collingwood and had Edwards not been canny enough to rise above the fray, her thoughts would have been given prominence not because of what they said about Collingwood's team but because they are now newsworthy in their own right. There are those who would argue that the women's game is nothing more than a watered-down version of the men's. When it comes to the speed of the bowlers and the power of the batsmen, it is a watered-down version of the men's game. The fastest ball recorded by a woman cricketer is 75mph, by Cathryn Fitzpatrick, the Australian. That is about Collingwood's pace and not quite as quick as Shahid Afridi's quicker ball - Afridi being a spinner. And the boundaries have to be brought in to satisfy the kind of six-hitting that Twenty20 demands.

But, really, that is to miss the point. It is like complaining that Usain Bolt cannot run as fast as a cheetah. Why compare two different species? Is it not enough to know that Bolt is the best of his kind? Men are more powerful and quicker than women, just as women have a greater pain threshold than men (my wife snorts when I tell her that passing kidney stones is the equivalent of giving birth). Men will always bowl more quickly and hit the ball farther than women.

But when it comes to skills as opposed to power or speed, the women could teach the men a thing or two. Katherine Brunt was able to control the swinging ball under pressure on a finals day at Lord's in a way that has not always been apparent in men's finals, as Scott Boswell, of Leicestershire, who got the yips in the 2001 Cheltenham & Gloucester Trophy final, would testify. Sarah Taylor, the England wicketkeeper, could pass on a tip or two to Matt Prior about soft hands (her stumping in the opening over of the final would have pleased James Foster) and I cannot remember a better chasing innings in a Twenty20 match than the one played by Claire Taylor against Australia.

Women's cricket in England is an outstanding success story. It shows what can be achieved when a governing body matches rhetoric with funding and when a bunch of talented individuals place the pursuit of excellence at the heart of everything they do. No doubt, after the Prime Minister's note last week, an invite to No 10 is in the post. Being wonderful ambassadors, too, just do not expect the rose bushes in the Downing Street garden to be given a good watering.

Telling matters of conscience

How would you feel if you looked in your bank account one day and found that you were substantially better off than you thought you were? You would be pretty chuffed, right? Now how would it feel if you found out that the money deposited in your bank account was stolen money? You would probably feel a little uneasy.

That is the position the ECB and various individual cricketers find themselves in now that, in a newly amended complaint, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission has alleged for the first time that Allen Stanford's cricketing operations, in particular the $36 million (now about £22 million) he spent on persuading English cricket that he would be a suitable partner, were funded through the proceeds of theft.

The official ECB line is that nothing has been proven and, even if it is, there is nothing to worry about. Contracts, signed in good faith, were honoured and the responsibility for Stanford's alleged crimes lies with the regulatory bodies. There is a difference, though, between a legal position and an ethical one.

The 18 first-class counties have in their bank accounts, or have spent, £900,000 of allegedly stolen money. Present and former players were paid thousands of pounds to promote the Stanford tournament. If Stanford is found guilty, will they do the decent thing? Don't hold your breath.

Pakistan victory hits tour hopes

Militant Islam does not like cricket. Five years ago, in response to the renewal of cricketing rivalry between India and Pakistan, the magazine of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant organisation responsible for the Mumbai and Lahore attacks, announced that cricket is “an evil and sinful sport”.

The warning went unheeded by those of us who felt that cricket would not be targeted on the sub-continent - until this year, of course, when the Sri Lanka team were attacked on their way to a Test match in Lahore.

Sport is a worry to dictators and fundamentalists everywhere because it tends not to be easily controlled or manipulated. Jesse Owens's haul of gold medals at the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936 gave the lie to Aryan supremacy as peddled by Hitler's National Socialists. The victory of Younus Khan's team in Sunday's World Twenty20 final showed that not only do Pakistan's Muslim team play cricket, but that they are rather better at it than everyone else, too.

That is a problem for the Taleban. It is why, despite Younus's heartfelt plea after the final for international cricket to be played in his country, Pakistan's victory makes touring there even less safe than it was before.