Angry Wilson quits ECB with attack on ICC

Des Wilson has resigned from the management board of the England and Wales Cricket Board after failing in his attempts to persuade them to take a strong moral stand over this November's proposed tour of Zimbabwe. Wilson was appointed chairman of the ECB's Corporate Affairs and Marketing Advisory Committee last year. His brief was to come up with a policy regarding the tour.

The end was inevitable from the moment that Wilson tried last Tuesday to persuade the board that if it had to tour, then it should do so under protest and adopt a tour-to-rule policy. He also argued that the board should actively try to change the stance of the ICC, so that it did consider moral issues. As Zimbabwe Cricket Union officials waited to address the meeting, Wilson was asked to leave. The final confirmation that the ECB was about to meekly fall into line was evident.

"I really thought I could make some difference," Wilson said. "They liked the idea of someone coming in with fresh ideas but the trouble is that when it comes to putting them into action, they don't like the reality.

"I have no desire to offer succour or support to the ECB's critics at a difficult time," he continued. "This is not an 'I'm right, you're wrong, I'm off' resignation. We simply differ, but the differences are profound. It is right, therefore, that I should go and thus enable the board to unite around the course it believes to be right.

"The fact is the ECB has been placed in an intolerable position by the ICC's inflexible and, in my view, malevolent enforcement of its international tours programme with draconian and disproportionate penalties that would devastate the English game, forcing the ECB itself into insolvency and bankrupting upto a third of the first-class counties.

"In the short term, I believe the ECB should make such a tour only under protest ... In so doing it would be seen to exercise both moral judgement and accountability to UK's political, public and cricket stakeholder opinion and take a first step to rejecting the unsustainable proposition that moral concerns have no place in sport.

"Even if this tour goes ahead, I believe the ECB should commit itself to fight for as many years as it takes to change the protocol so that no other country can be coerced in this way. Alas, there appears no appetite for that course of action either."

When Wilson's proposals were widely leaked to the press in January, it appeared that the ECB were taking a new moral standpoint. But when the ICC threatened severe financial repercussions were the tour to be called-off on moral grounds, the ECB backed down.

Wilson's resignation was no surprise to the ECB, but the tone of his statement was. "Clearly, there is a difference of opinion between Des and most other members of the board over our strategy towards the Zimbabwe tour," explained David Morgan, the chairman. "The ECB doesn't share his views over the role he alleges the ICC have played in this extremely difficult issue. The ICC needs to balance the concerns of all its members and always has to act decisively and fairly in the wider interests of the game, as they have done in respect of England's scheduled tour of Zimbabwe."

As for the ICC, Ehsan Mani told The Times that Wilson had to go as a result of the "deliberately leaked" paper in January. "It should have come as no surprise to him that the net effect of his leaking was to damage relations between the ECB and other boards. While he sought to force his own view of the world on others, Wilson lacked the ability or willingness to listen and understand the views of people who did not share his perceptions. "The fact remains that all countries, including England, support the position that safety and security are the factors to be taken into account when assessing whether a tour is to proceed."