Tim Lamb      

Tim Lamb, who retired from first-class cricket at 30 after bowling energetic seam-up for Oxford University, Middlesex and Northamptonshire, was appointed as chief executive of the ECB in 1996 on a manifesto that cricket should be treated as "a business within a game rather than a game within a business". The mantra caught the mood of the times: during his tenure cricket globally transformed itself in the name of commerce. But Lamb had his detractors before he resigned from the post in May 2004. His handling of the Zimbabwe affair during the 2003 World Cup polarised opinion, and his part in the Theresa Harrild sex-discrimination case a few years previously was another low point. He kept at arm's length the Professional Cricketers' Association, which unsuccessfully called for 19th-county status throughout his reign, and was also blamed in some quarters for over-manning his Lord's departments. It was again the question on whether to tour Zimbabwe in 2004-05 which led to his final resignation. Lamb left the ECB at the end of September 2004 - and, typically, the first questions his successor David Collier had to answer were about Zimbabwe.
Simon Wilde