Oh just face it: you screwed up

The effrontery of ECB's Giles Clarke and David Collier during the Stanford fiasco has been staggering on a number of levels, writes Lawrence Booth in the Guardian.

The effrontery is staggering on so many levels, the consistency of the logic shaky at best. Collier told BBC radio's Garry Richardson that there would have been an outcry if the ECB had looked Stanford's gift-horse in the mouth. Yet Stanford had already been turned away by India and South Africa, and hardly a peep of protest was heard from fans or administrators in those countries concerned about missing out on a giant pay-day. And if Collier really didn't think he had done anything wrong, why did he and Clarke even bother to discuss the issue of resignation?

Also read Nasser Hussain's interview with ECB chairman Giles Clarke in the Daily Mail.

NH: Let’s get into the Stanford affair. Did you do proper due diligence? One of his associates said the ECB were very naive not to raise concerns. It would have been easy to do so.

GC: Our job fundamentally was to see whether he could pay. There would have been nothing more shocking than to play the game and then nobody was paid. We aren’t financial service regulators. If these things were so simple why have the Securities Exchange Commission not taken the action they did considerably earlier? Their job is to protect investors. They didn’t. We are a national sporting body who were paid a sum of money for a match that was sanctioned and approved by the International Cricket Council. The West Indies board have been doing business with Stanford for many years.