As the fourth Test begins at Trent Bridge today, Chief Sports Writer Scott Wilson looks at the revival in the popularity of cricket and how it's outstripping the beautiful game.

IT might not be the most auspicious of venues, but Darlington's South Park has always proved a reliable barometer of the nation's sporting mood. Its tennis courts might be popular during the Wimbledon fortnight, and it tends to resemble a driving range while the Open runs its course but, for every other week of the year, football dominates the wide open spaces in the same way it overshadows everything else in the British sporting landscape.

Or at least it used to. Wander into South Park this evening and you will see the same children who were there weeks ago, playing with their usual energy and enthusiasm.

But, instead of using jumpers for goalposts, those same youngsters are using sticks for stumps. Dreams of shooting like Defoe are replaced by hopes of bowling like Harmison and fantasies of tackling like Ferdinand are swapped for visions of batting like Vaughan. In this most glorious of Ashes summers, the cricket ball is once again king.

For a sport that was dying a slow and painful death in the late 1990s, the renaissance has been nothing short of remarkable.

In August 1999, English cricket was at its nadir. Nasser Hussain's side, which had failed to qualify for the knockout stages of the World Cup earlier in the summer despite enjoying the benefits of home advantage, had slipped to one off bottom in the world rankings following a catastrophic series defeat to a mediocre New Zealand.

Today, as Trent Bridge hosts the fourth and potentially decisive Test against Australia, England can justifiably claim to be the best team in the world. They have won 14 out of 18 Tests against West Indies, New Zealand, South Africa and Bangladesh and are on the verge of regaining the fabled Ashes for the first time since 1987.

But, more importantly, Michael Vaughan's men have salvaged cricket's reputation just as it looked to be becoming an irrelevant throwback to a bygone age.

Thanks to Andrew "Freddie" Flintoff's hitting and Kevin Pietersen's hair, cricket is cool and, even before last week's debacle in Denmark, it is football that is having to fight for its place in the limelight.

"I walked past a field the other day that I'd never seen anyone playing in before and, right in the middle of it, there was a father and his sons playing cricket," says Nick Brown, the cricket development officer for the Durham Cricket Board, a North-East organisation funded by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) to promote the game amongst the region's youngsters.

"England's success this summer has unquestionably played a part in that. The phone has been ringing off the hook in the last week or so with children and parents wanting to know where their nearest coaching course is.

"There's a definite feelgood factor about the sport at the moment and it's nice to see the likes of Steve Harmison and Andrew Flintoff turning youngsters on to the sport.

"With Steve being an Ashington lad, it's great for us to be able to point to someone children know and say, 'You can be just like him because he started up here just like you are now'."

It is not just childrens' imaginations that are being captured either. The final day of the Old Trafford Test - a five-day thriller that went down to the very last ball - brought C4 their best ever share of total TV viewing figures for a Monday.

More than 7.7m people watched Harmison bowl the final ball of the game, while up to 20,000 fans were turned away from the ground as the Sold Out signs went up long before the start of play.

An extra 25,000 replica shirts have been sold this summer - with England cricket tops currently outselling their footballing equivalents by two to one - and the ECB was forced to double its original order of 20,000 DVDs of England's second Test win when they sold out within a week.

Impressive statistics but, while the current Ashes series has undoubtedly raised cricket's profile, it is wrong to assume the change in mood has occurred overnight.

"The Ashes have been a spur, but a lot of people have put a lot of work into moving cricket forward over the last decade or so," says Brown.

"When I came into this job nine years ago, we were going into about 30 different schools a year to introduce children to cricket. This year, that number will be more like 200.

"The ECB has introduced a number of different schemes for children that have really taken off. We've developed things like quick cricket and Inter cricket that are simplified versions of the game that don't need the kind of specialist equipment a lot of schools can't afford.

"We can get kids playing cricket on a tennis court or a school yard with just a bat, a ball and a set of stumps. By the end of the summer, we'll have had 7,000 kids in the North-East taking part in a game like that.

"Once we've got them interested, the challenge then is to introduce them to their local club. With funding from the ECB we've been able to target clubs and make it far easier for them to make kids feel welcome and help them improve."

That progressive stance has also been mirrored at Test level. In the past, England sides have been hampered by player burn-out and a revolving door selection policy that saw promising youngsters abandoned after their first failure.

Under the tutelage of ECB chairman David Graveney and coach Duncan Fletcher, the current England set-up is notable for its consistency of method and stability of personnel.

The advent of central contracts - whereby players are contracted to the ECB and not the counties and their participation in domestic competition is severely restricted - has been crucial to England's development, while Fletcher's belligerent management style has imbued his side with a winner-takes-all mentality that had previously been the reserve of today's opponents, Australia.

"His team ethic is very strong," explains Bob Woolmer, the English-born coach of Pakistan who worked alongside Fletcher on the coaching staff of South Africa during the mid-1990s. "It's very similar to the ethic that has served Australia so well.

"The team is all-important and, if you don't fit into that, then you are not part of his family.

"He is probably the major character who has taken the England side to a different level, certainly in Test cricket."

Fletcher has been assisted, of course, by the crop of talented youngsters that have suddenly broken into the England team.

Pietersen and Andrew Strauss have quickly developed into match-winning batsmen at the highest level, while Harmison and Simon Jones have learnt how to terrorise with the ball. Crucially, Flintoff is capable of doing both, as underlined by his exhilarating performances this month.

The extent of their improvement will become clear within the next five days as England strive for the win that would go a long way towards determining the outcome of this most unpredictable of Ashes series.

A victory would leave Australia needing to win the final Test of the summer to finish all-square. But regardless of what happens at Trent Bridge, England's cricketers have succeeded in their biggest battle this summer. The fight for the nation's sporting soul has already been won.