Should Giles Clarke go?

They are probably making omelettes with the egg being scraped off the collective face of the ECB following the collapse of the Stanford venture. Whether it was a blunder of such incompetence that resignations would be appropriate, though, is quite another matter.

The main criticism appears to be that their inquiries into Stanford’s business were not adequate, because all they really sought to establish was whether Stanford would be able to cough up the cash that he was promising and did not seek to penetrate the convoluted structure of his financial vehicles in as much detail as the US SEC.

Arguably they should have delved a bit deeper than they did, but it grates more than somewhat having this criticism levelled by counties whose teams paraded round the cricket grounds of England in 2008 sporting the logos of financial institutions which are now largely owned by the government because the perpetrators of what amounts to institutionalised fraud are being propped up rather than prosecuted. What due diligence did those counties undertake before accepting the cash of bankers whose declared wealth was based on loans which would not be repaid, and why are they so different from Stanford whose declared wealth was based on deposits he allegedly did not make?

It is easy after the fact to say that the ECB should have seen through statements about fantastic rates of return on investments as being impossible, but a year ago the press were still running gosh-wow stories about hedge fund managers who made millions every day through aggressive betting on stock market gyrations. By the standards operative in the business world of early 2008, it’s hard to see how the ECB are exceptionally culpable.

But it provides another useful soapbox for the Get Rid Of Giles (GROG) brigade to shout from, and they have been predictably vociferous.

Clarke does himself few favours. Charm is not a trait one readily associates with him. Courting Stanford has been a bad mistake, but its inspiration was of a piece with the TV rights saga. Clarke is identified as the chief architect of the deal which took live Test cricket off free-to-air – which has doubled the amount of money coming into English cricket from that source at the cost of annoying a lot of people. Stanford’s dismissive view of Test cricket compared with populist Twenty20 would never endear him to English traditionalists, but Clarke saw a potentially lucrative business opportunity and went for it.

In both, the aim was to bring more money in so as to allow more money to be spent within an English game constituted roughly as at present.

The GROG supporters, though, want to demolish the present structure. They are the prime movers behind the schemes for scrapping the counties and setting up city-based commercial franchises whose object would be to make money for their owners. Their real beef with the present ECB direction as led by Giles Clarke is that all the money the ECB raises gets ploughed back into cricket rather than handed out as dividends for the owners of the property companies which will own the multi-purpose stadia.

Clarke’s county, Somerset, have thrived commercially by building on their traditional strengths and assiduous marketing in their catchment area. Writ large, Clarke has sought to pursue the same strategy at the ECB. His opponents, at bottom, invite us to believe that there are huge as yet untapped reserves of potential punters in a few large cities who can easily be wooed away from their football obsession, thus replacing the troublesome public which currently provides the majority of support for the game. As a model, it may well work in India where cricket can generate far more income than it can usefully reinvest, thus allowing the promoters to take profits without detriment to the sport, but hoping that something similar could be achieved in England is the sort of wild optimism which would have been difficult to sustain in the boom times but is unthinkable in the present recessionary climate. Were they to get their way only for the whole thing to collapse because their optimism was ill-founded, English cricket would be devastated, quite possibly beyond salvaging.

The ECB is far from perfect, and Giles Clarke is one of its more imperfect manifestations, but I am far more sympathetic to their general approach than to that of the revolutionaries who put Viscount Marland up as their figurehead.