MCC appoint Phillip Hodson next president

Phillip Hodson, a Yorkshire businessman and former Cambridge cricketer, will serve as the next president of the Marylebone Cricket Club, for a one-year term that starts on October 1. Hodson will become only the fourth MCC President to hail from Yorkshire, and the first for 50 years.

His appointment was announced at Lord's, on Wednesday, by current club president Christopher Martin-Jenkins, during the MCC's annual general meeting. Apart from playing for Cambridge, Hodson also played over 300 games for the MCC and represented the club on several tours.

He joined the players and fixtures sub-committee in 1987, became chairman of that committee in 1993, and continued to serve on it until 2000. He has spent eleven years on the main committee, five on membership and general purposes committee and now stands on the cricket committee and the youth sub-committee.

Hodson is also chief executive of the Oval group, the biggest privately-owned corporate insurance brokers in the UK. The Oval group currently sponsors Leicestershire CCC and Durham MCC University.

"I believe that Phillip Hodson will become only the fourth President in a very long line to be what one might call Yorkshire through and through, and he follows three very distinguished presidents indeed in Lord Hawke, Sir Stanley Jackson and Sir William Worsley," Martin-Jenkins said of his successor. "But for so great a cricketing county you might think only three MCC presidents a rather scant representation.

"Phillip is a man greatly respected by everyone who knows him and who has worked with him at the MCC, and he has already been a great servant of this club."