ECB name review team

Nick Knight is the most recent player to be named in the panel © Getty Images

The ECB have confirmed the seven-man review committee which will undertake an assessment of English cricket following the Ashes whitewash. As announced earlier this week Ken Schofield, the former executive director of the PGA Tour, will head a group containing six former Test cricketers.

Nasser Hussain, Nick Knight, Angus Fraser, Hugh Morris and Micky Stewart are joined by Brian Rose, the director of cricket at Somerset, who played nine Tests but will also bring an administrative and business point of view. However, there is no place on the panel for Mike Atherton, who'd been widely expected to take a role.

Between them the panel has a total of 179 Tests and 232 ODIs over first-class careers stretched from 1954 to 2006, with Knight having only retired from Warwickshire last summer. Stewart, meanwhile, has also been coach and manager of the England team.

The inclusion of Morris, who is the ECB's deputy chief executive, seems to go against the statement that the review will be "fully independent", but David Collier, the chief executive, defended the move. "He's not a board director and he's not in charge of that area [international cricket], whereas I am a board director, so that's the logic there."

The review panel will take a comprehensive look at the game, not just the Ashes defeat, and recommend what needs to be done to give England its best chance of regaining the Ashes in 2009 and winning a global one-day event by 2011.

David Morgan, the ECB chairman, said: "The board has determined that this review forms a critical element of ECB's planning for the four-year cycle, which commences immediately after the 2007 World Cup.

"The board is delighted that such a high-profile team has been assembled with great experience of both playing and coaching at international and domestic level and looks forward to receiving the report at our March meeting."