Global one-day tournaments are cricket's equivalent of the FA Cup. Before the serious business of the Super Eights and the knockout stages begin, uninterested observers pray that one of the highly professional, tick-all-the-boxes, minute-attention-to-detail teams will somehow fall arse over tit on banana skins otherwise known as the Netherlands, Scotland or Ireland. It is a great hoot to see the mighty stumble and fall - as long as it is not your team being humbled.

One-day cricket, and especially Twenty20, makes an upset all the more likely because the short form of the game does not allow the star players time to impose themselves on proceedings. Australia - tee-hee - have been involved in two of the biggest upsets, when they lost to Bangladesh in 2005 at Cardiff in a 50-over tri-series match and to Zimbabwe during the group stage of the inaugural World Twenty20 two years ago - although Kenya's defeat of West Indies in the 1996 World Cup had equal shock value.

Genuine upsets are still rare, though, even in one-day cricket. The chances of Scotland, Ireland and the Netherlands adding a scalp or two during the World Twenty20 starting tomorrow are nil in the case of Scotland and the Netherlands, and slim in the case of Ireland, the best of the associate nations. In a sport in which skill levels and technique, rather than physical fitness, determine outcomes, the gap between professionals and semi-professionals-cum-amateurs is still too wide to bridge.

Time, then, to celebrate the presence in the tournament of a man for whom the lure of professional sport has been easy to resist and who still manages more than to hold his own at the top table.

The well-travelled Dirk Nannes, otherwise known as “the Diggler”, tousle-haired and with a Viking's beard and temperament to match, will be leading the charge tomorrow for the Netherlands with his left-arm thunderbolts (according to Virender Sehwag, Nannes is the quickest bowler he has faced). If they are to give England a scare, it is likely that Nannes or Ryan ten Doeschate, the most experienced first-class cricketers for the Dutch, will have to do some damage.

However, to describe Nannes, 33 years young and in the form of his life, as an experienced first-class cricketer is to miss the point entirely. Nannes has been playing the game professionally for less than three years, coming to cricket almost as an accident after, one suspects, getting his fun out of the way first. In his twenties he was on the fringes of Australia's World Cup skiing squad and ran a ski business to make ends meet while playing the saxophone and learning Japanese on the side.

Eventually he tried his hand at cricket, briefly for Middlesex, then with greater success for Victorian Bushrangers, so that his non-selection for the Australia team for this tournament was a surprise. More recently he starred with Delhi Daredevils, where he kept the great Glenn McGrath on the sidelines. This caused Nannes no end of mirth. “I'll be able to tell the grandchildren that I kept the greatest fast bowler in the history of the game out of the team,” he said.

It is indicative of just how blinkered and how limited in life experiences top sportsmen have become that we grab voraciously at anyone who has done anything out of the ordinary. Cricketers are, by and large, decent folk, but nets, nets and more nets make for a dull boy. In Nannes's eyes there is a glint of something a little more interesting.

He is something of a throwback to a time when sport could accommodate men with a varied hinterland, who were not prepared to be suffocated by the blinkered demands of professionalism. The amateur era revelled in its renaissance characters such as

C.B. Fry, variously a politician, diplomat, academic, writer, publisher, long jump world record-holder, rugby player, footballer and outstanding cricketer, but once the professional game took hold it was as much as anyone could do to hold their own at two sports, never mind much else.

Now it would be impossible for a precociously talented schoolboy to play two leading sports at the highest level because they are funnelled down a specialist path sooner than ever before. Football academies suck in the most talented at 9 years old and spit most out at 16. Cricket is a 12-month option for the brightest and best schoolboys. Eating, drinking and sleeping cricket is the order of the day at academies, which excludes those who would rather dabble at other things for a while, or indeed the late developers.

Next year, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the ECB and the counties will come into operation that will make it even harder for those, such as Nannes, who wish to live a full life before playing sport. Research has suggested that the most successful international cricketers - those who receive 50 caps or more - have usually been picked for the first time before the age of 25. Accordingly, the performance-related fee payments will be structured to encourage counties to pick young England-qualified players.

Counties will receive £2,000 for each England-qualified cricketer under the age of 22 who plays in a championship match and £1,600 for every under-26 player, payments to be made for a maximum of five players. The rationale behind the MoU is laudable, trying as it is to give more opportunities to young English players. The unintended consequences, though, will be severe for late developers or the dabblers. The international scene will become ever more stuffed with those who have been spoon-fed a diet of cricket since puberty.

Is this a good thing? Andy Flower, the England team director, clearly thinks not. Commenting on England's efforts to raise the profile of Cricket against Hunger during the World Twenty20 campaign, Flower said: “The more rounded you are as a person, the better chance you have as a cricketer.”

Had he inverted his sentence, Flower would have been just as accurate: the more rounded you are as a cricketer, the better chance you have as a human being. These were thoughts echoed inadvertently this week by Sean Morris, the chief executive of the Professional Cricketers' Association, when he pledged his organisation's support for Chris Lewis as he starts his prison sentence for drug smuggling. Readjusting to normal life after a career of professional sport, Morris said, is “very, very difficult”.

At a time when cricket is super-professionalised, Nannes's recent success in the IPL, and his mere presence as a potential threat tomorrow evening, is to be celebrated. “I never had any aspirations to play international cricket,” he has said. “I just fell into it. I always played backyard cricket with my brother, but I was in the thirds at school and the thirds at my club side.”

He is, then, a symbol of hope for all the late developers and all those who are too lively of mind to want to restrict themselves when just out of diapers to a life of sport. He represents the ever-present possibility that it is never too late and, with a smile on his face and not a care in the world, he may just make England's banana skin a bit more slippery.

In a league of their own

The future looks grim for the rebel Indian Cricket League (ICL) now that the exodus from its ranks has been accompanied by an amnesty from the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI). With no immediate prospect of pay or indeed of cricket, more are likely to follow, even though Tony Greig, the public face and voice of the ICL, has indicated that the fight has not yet been lost.

But the fight was lost long ago, when the BCCI set up its own tournament (the Indian Premier League) in the wake of the ICL and decided that, although the free market was a fair philosophy when it came to auctioning players, it was not prepared to suffer any competition on its doorstep. The viciousness with which the BCCI/IPL treated the ICL and those associated with it has been a constant reminder of where the ultimate power in the game lies.