At the same time that David Cameron was cancelling his post-election holiday plans and attempting to defuse the booby trap he left in the bidet at No. 10, another new-old face was sidling back into the public eye. The ECB - increasingly resembling a long-running soap opera so stuck for new ideas that the writers keep bringing back characters you thought had been killed off - has appointed one of the popular Andrews from the last series to be director of cricket.

It could be just the right job for him - after all, the title Director of Cricket is a bit like an Andrew Strauss sentence: vaguely meaningful, yet at the same time meaningfully vague.

Director of Cricket. What does it involve, exactly? Is it like directing traffic? Is Strauss to be an expensively educated traffic light, stopping the cricket from going too fast, or blowing his whistle ineffectually when the cricket has executed an illegal u-turn and is heading in the wrong direction?

Or perhaps he will be directing in the same sense that George Lucas directs, in which case his first act has been to fire Jar Jar Binks.

So brief was the interval between Andrew arriving in his office and Andrew sending his "Dear Peter" email that you'd be forgiven for thinking he was given the job expressly for that purpose; a grinning assassin called in because everyone else was too embarrassed to sack a man they'd already sacked once before.

I expect his job description looks something like this:

1. Sack Peter Moores
2. Don't forget not to re-hire Peter Moores
3. Ensure that your tie complements your jacket at all times

So far so good.

But Strauss wasn't the only cricketer to turn up at Lord's, courtesy the ECB's career recycling programme. England's greatest living Test captain, Michael Atherton* has been appointed Director of Plausible Excuses. Atherton is said to be excited at his new role - you can tell he is excited, because he isn't frowning - and is looking forward to airing some of his popular excuses from the 1990s, such as, "They were better than us", and "We weren't very good", and "Thank God that's over."

There is also a place in the ECB's new line-up for Nicholas Knight, who is the new Director of Standing About on the Field Before the Toss. It will be Nick's job to co-ordinate the hangers-on, bystanders and general loiterers who clutter up the outfield in the hour before a Test match. This new role has been criticised by the media, but when asked whether he was happy to do a job in which he was essentially surplus to requirements, Nick said that he saw it very much as a continuation of his work as an England batsman and Sky commentator.

The final appointment was made by Strauss himself. Keen to ensure that other international teams don't have a number-crunching advantage, the ECB has appointed a Director of High-Performance Spreadsheets, a Mr P Moores.

"Mr Moores has vast experience with numbers, and a deep and slightly worrying intimacy with Excel," said Director Strauss, "To be honest, I didn't think we'd get him, but as luck would have it, he has recently become available. I look forward to working closely with him until next Tuesday when we will unfortunately have to let him go."