Yes, of course, hats off, much respect and well done to everyone who climbed the horizontal Everest of the London Marathon and raised thousands for charity, tens of millions between them. Of course the London Marathon is a Good Thing, but I must confess I always thought it was a race between equals: good chaps and chappesses all in it together, all wanting to have the Big Experience and to raise plenty of dough each for their favourite charity, small or large.

They all apply to run and the lucky ones take to the streets in athletic and charitable camaraderie - that's how it must be, no? But it's not actually like that. Of those who run, 15,000 - that's half - do so because their charity pays £300 to the marathon organisers.

These are Golden Bond places and they are owned mostly by the big charities. By buying them up, they guarantee themselves a number of runners every year, all of whom raise (or pay up themselves) a hefty sum for the charity in question. In other words, the charities speculate by buying up these places, then turn a profit.

Oh, there's nothing shady about it. The money goes to good sporting causes in the London boroughs. It's just that the money you thought you were giving to your friend in aid of, say, cancer relief or a children's hospital is also going to a gym in Bexleyheath or maybe a football pitch in Whetstone. Nothing wrong with either project, but it's not what you think is happening to your money.

There are two questions arising. One is that it is a carve-up of the big charities against the small charities; that is all part of the usual trend of the rich getting richer, money going to money. The other is the question of transparency.

I heard about this from my old friend, Lucy Mathen, who runs the charity, Second Sight, and is a pretty mean runner herself. Second Sight sends eye surgeons to India to perform cataract operations. Every halfpenny raised for Second Sight goes directly to the task of making the blind see. Lucy would consider speculating on a £300 Golden Bond as immoral. Six runners wanted to run for Second Sight this year, all of them failed to win a place in the ballot. But it's not, Lucy says, a whinge about lost income, even if such a whinge seems perfectly legitimate to me.

“It comes down to a question of honesty,” she said. “The public think that if you want to run for your favourite charity, the London Marathon will give you a place, without favouring one charity over another. It doesn't. They think the money they give a runner all goes to the charity he names. It doesn't. I'm not easy with that. My view is that people who give money to a charity don't want to feel conned.”

This costume drama is a farce

As I watched the World Short Course Championships in Manchester during the past week, I have got more and more confused by the swimming costumes. It seems that there are suits out there that genuinely improve your performance. It's actually measurable: swimmers who wear the right costume improve by an average of 2 per cent. The leader here is the LZR Racer from Speedo, which uses Fastskin technology; but Arena is catching up with its version, the Revolution.

But hang on a minute. Is swimming now an equipment sport? Must we hand the advantage to swimmers who are rich and/or sponsored? Is swimming about the best cozzie rather than the best athlete? Do we want swimming to become like Formula One, a battle not between individuals but between manufacturers?

Well, I don't. If I may say so without being overly lascivious, we need competitors to swim as close to the way nature intended as possible. We don't, for example, like swimmers who steal an unnatural advantage by using drugs. Well, I am not happy with players who do the same thing with fancy clothes. “Doping on a hanger,” as my colleague, Craig Lord, swimming correspondent of this parish, put it.

It's one more example of what happens when people are more interested in money than in sport. They generally get the money, but the sport gets lost somewhere along the way.

Is this any way to run a country?

When you hire a management consultant, you are employing a highly trained sniffer dog. What he seeks is not explosives or drugs, but bulls***. Every time he comes across a cache of bulls*** he wags his tail and barks his head off. So if you claim that your company's main function is to do this, but it is actually spending most of its money to do that, your management consultant will point this out to you with a lucidity that frightens the pants off you.

William Buckland is that sniffer dog. He is also a lover of cricket. And having that cast

of mind, he simply cannot help himself. He looks towards the structure of English cricket and ... Woof woof! Wag wag! My God, is this the biggest pile of bulls*** in the entirety of the world?

A forensic examination of cricket's management leads to an irrefragable conclusion: that English cricket is not run for the excellence of the national team, still less for the pleasure of those who follow cricket. It is being run for other purposes entirely. Logical, clear and utterly remorseless, Buckland takes us to places where other committee-mired examinations of cricket have never dared to go. Let's savour some of that prose.

“It seems that the main purpose of the England team today is to generate profits to sustain a domestic system that has failed as a commercial entertainment proposition... The bulk of England's profits have been spent to sustain county failure ... apart from its patent economic absurdity, this strategy is a perversion of the ethic of a national sports team.”

Want more? On county cricket: “Never in the history of sport have so many been paid so much to perform so often in front of so few.” The new money that has come into the sport has served “to paste a veneer of faux commercialism on to a core of feudalism and produce an enterprise that is, fundamentally, an old-style unregulated monopoly run in the interests of its members”.

This is all in Buckland's newly published book, Pommies. It should be compulsory reading for everyone in cricket. “The MCC and counties and their ECB are self-serving privately owned organisations that are not fit to run a team called England.”

A wizard idea

Oh, how small matters gratify. In The Times last week, a piece about Daniel Radcliffe, the actor, who plays Harry Potter and is a cricket lover, was placed opposite a piece headlined “IPL snap up Snape to help players with mind matters”. Occlumency? But surely what every cricketer needs above all is a mastery of Defence Against the Dark Arts.