The ECB needs you (or maybe not)

We've all had a chuckle about Team England's famously extensive army of backroom staff, which includes a feng-shui consultant, a yawn-analyst, a part-time egg-cup warmer, a head taster (whose main job is to ensure that no disgruntled player has tampered with Alastair Cook's breakfast bowl of prune juice and granola) and a nanny for Joe Root.

Yet the real overstaffing is not to be found in the England dressing room but at ECB HQ, where grandiose job titles proliferate like dandelions on an abandoned building site, and where there are so many Bentleys and Jaguars arriving every morning that the ECB is planning to annex a nearby school playing field to extend their executive car park.

The news this week that David Collier is to step down as chief suit has provoked a surge of excitement among the administrative classes, and as we speak the doormat at ECB Towers is already piled high with imaginatively embroidered CVs. Here is the pick of the ripest contenders to take Collier's executive toilet pass.

Simon Seized-Assets
Previously the Director of Jargon at Freaks Business School (Harvard), Seized-Assets has had several high-profile positions in the banking industry, including Chief Turning A Blind Eye Officer at Money Brothers and Head of Laundering at Bloated Bank PLC. Currently working closely with the FBI, he will be available for interview just as soon as he makes bail.

Steve Spreadsheet
Noted for his ability to work out each person's share of the lunch bill in his head without moving his lips, Spreadsheet holds a diploma in Star Trek studies and a black belt in Excel. He is considered the insiders' choice after his successful behind-the-scenes work in rationalising Giles Clarke's wine cellar and teaching him how to turn on his computer.

Sebastian School-Tie
A former Captain in the Washing-Up Regiment of the Catering Corps, School-Tie left Snobchester School with a GCSE in Nepotism and studied Idiocy at Loaded College, Cambridge, before going on to Sandhurst, where he was employed as a rugby post. Known as "Imbecile" to his friends, he is said to know very little about cricket, which is seen as an advantage, as is his ownership of a jolly nice place in Oxfordshire and a villa in Barbados.

Skye Subscription
As chief executive of Borechester Village Cricket Club, she successfully sued two elderly gentleman who had paused to watch the cricket on their way to the post office, on the grounds that they hadn't purchased a Borchester Village Cricket Club Membership (reasonably priced at £100 per minute) and so were legally obliged to avert their eyes from the game as they passed. Said to be Giles Clarke's preferred choice.

Stuart Subsidy
A keen taxidermist, Subsidy has worked with the World Bank and the IMF, and has for the last five years been Director of Egregious Construction at Snoreshire County Cricket Club. He has revitalised the county's financial fortunes by selling half of the ground to the Mao Tse Tsung Smelting Company and replacing the Victorian pavilion with county cricket's first-ever Hospitality Tangerine: a 100-foot tall fibreglass complex complete with spa, swimming pool, driving range, crematorium and sushi bar.