Lord MacLaurin backs Fletcher, Hussain and county cricket

The chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board, Lord MacLaurin has publicly backed the England coach and captain, Duncan Fletcher and Nasser Hussain, and stated that he would like them to stay on beyond next year's World Cup in South Africa.

He praised their work during the winter tours to Zimbabwe, India and New Zealand.

Not so impressive, according to Lord MacLaurin, was the lack of discipline shown by players who failed to maintain their levels of fitness before reporting for the New Zealand leg of the tours. Both James Ormond and Usman Afzaal were the subject of criticism earlier in the winter for allowing their weight to rise.

In a radio interview, Lord MacLaurin said: "I would very much like Duncan and Nasser to stay. I'm always talking to Duncan on a very regular basis and he's done a very good job in his management of the England side.

"However, the sad thing I'll take from these tours is that when the players turned up to tour New Zealand some of them weren't fit and that is not acceptable for international cricketers.

"They had a programme they had to keep when they left India and some of the players were not as fit as they should have been when they turned up in New Zealand. I find that very strange and not very clever."

At a time when the domestic structure has come in for criticism, notably in the recently-published Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, the chairman was quick to come to its defence, even if he admits that the county game is not "sacrosanct" and that it needs to become more popular with younger followers.

Commenting on the Wisden reference he said: "I read that with quite a lot of interest and obviously it is designed to be provocative. But our county structure is there, we have 18 clubs and they are our centres of excellence.

"The county game should be promoted in a much more vigorous way. There has been talk of a possible 20-over competition to attract younger people along, I'm very much in favour of that sort of thing."

The ECB committee meets on Thursday to discuss ways in which the game might be restructured to give county cricket a wider appeal and to produce higher quality Test cricketers.