English cricket’s new chief Colin Graves plans to reinvent the game from the professional level down to the amateur leagues, making it the “centre of the community”
John Stern23-Apr-2015Day job: Firefighter
Mood: Impatient
Party trick: Keeping Yorkshire CCC solvent
Specialist subject: Costcutter (the clue’s in the name)”I’m starting with a blank sheet of paper,” says Colin Graves, who replaces Giles Clarke as chairman of ECB on May 15.You can take that statement of intent however you wish, given how much seems to be up for grabs in English cricket right now. It might mean a return for Kevin Pietersen; it might mean sackings all round at the top of Team England; a management role for Graves’ fellow South Yorkshireman, Michael Vaughan; four-day Test cricket; live cricket back on free-to-air television; or an IPL/Big Bash-style T20 competition in the middle of the English summer.Graves is deliberately unspecific about the various radical proposals that have been floating around since his election, and that’s only partly because he hasn’t actually started his new role yet.As he sits in a meeting room on the ground floor of the ECB’s offices at Lord’s (all the senior executives have their offices on the second floor), he is giving a very good impression of a man about to start a firework display in his back garden – and those rockets are ready to fire up a few important backsides.He set a Catherine wheel whirring with his first major public utterance when he opened the door for Pietersen to return to the England fold. “The first thing he has to do if he wants to get back is start playing county cricket,” he told BBC Radio 5. “The selectors and coaches are not going to pick him if he’s not playing. It’s as simple as that. I’ll leave it at that.” What appeared at the time to be an unguarded remark now seems to be a carefully calculated attempt to lift the smog that had settled on English cricket since Pietersen’s ham-fisted removal early last year.The less than enthusiastic response from senior figures, including Test captain Alastair Cook, to the prospect of another round of KP rehabilitation has only served to expose the fault-lines that exist at the top of the game. Rather than paper over those cracks, Graves seems determined to confront the issues head on.It is, by grim coincidence, the day after England’s fateful defenestration by Bangladesh at the World Cup in Adelaide. Graves’ reaction chimes with the sort of bewilderment felt by thousands of England followers across the country, although “massively disappointing” is a somewhat more understated comment than that which greeted Yorkshire’s relegation from Division 1 of the County Championship in 2011 when he labelled the players’ performance as “a disgrace”.
“Cricket used to have the summer to itself, it doesn’t anymore. When the football World Cup is in the winter, the Premier League season will encroach further into summer. They might decide they like that. We can’t sit here and just say we’re the summer sport.”Colin Graves
One suspects he might be less charitable about any future debacles. In case anyone needs reminding, Yorkshire are now the reigning county champions with a largely homegrown squad and are also on a much sounder financial footing than when he first took over as the club’s chairman in 2002.So unequivocally wretched was England’s World Cup campaign, that Graves essentially takes the view that it was so bad it’s good. “It’s an opportunity to look at what we’re doing and how we can improve. It’s sent us a message and we’ve got to pick it up. How do we regroup? How do we get better? Simple as that.”Graves, who has been deputy chairman of the ECB since 2010, sees many parallels in his experiences at Yorkshire with what he is about to embark on at national level. Prudent husbandry is one. “I’m a tight Yorkshireman,” he says with a smile and a chuckle. “I want to go through the whole costs of the ECB and see where we spend our money. And if it’s wasted, we won’t be doing it long.”
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Graves made his millions through the Costcutter chain of convenience stores which he founded in 1984. When it comes to his thriftiness, the clue’s in the store name, right? “Exactly,” he says.Another focus is the unification of the recreational game and the professional game. “We’ve got to join them up so the recreational game feeds the professional game and the professional game has links down to the recreational game,” says Graves. “Link all that together and make people feel part of the whole. That’s one thing Mark Arthur [chief executive] achieved at Yorkshire – the Yorkshire Cricket Board and Yorkshire County Cricket Club coming together. If that can happen in Yorkshire then it can happen anywhere.”Thirdly is the challenge that is felt more starkly at Headingley than almost anywhere else in the country: selling tickets for international cricket. As the euphoria of the Championship win bubbled over in Leeds last September, Graves issued a warning to the county’s cricket fraternity that they needed to support international matches at Headingley otherwise their club faced an uncertain future. “It ain’t rocket science,” Graves said at the time.In national terms, he doesn’t use the word crisis but his tone is clear enough. “Cricket used to have the summer to itself, but it doesn’t anymore,” he says. “That will get worse. When the football World Cup is in the winter, the Premier League season will encroach further into summer. They might decide they like that. We can’t sit here and just say we’re the summer sport.”Is more KP rehabilitation on the agenda under the new chairman?•Getty ImagesThere hasn’t been much to sugar-coat the last 12 months for English cricket: the Pietersen sacking and its continuing aftershocks; the one-day hammerings and the early World Cup exit; and the fall in participation figures revealed by the ECB’s own research last November.And the link between Graves’ three priorities is a shift of emphasis away from an obsession with the resourcing, and success, of Team England towards the wider game. “We want to make this better for everybody,” he says. “We are in the entertainment business and we either put bums on seats in stadiums or we put people in front of televisions. So that’s one of my criteria – how do we increase participation in the game, whether that’s playing or watching. That’s where I’m starting from.”Of course I want a successful England team but that has to fit into a jigsaw that suits everybody. We can’t just be dogmatic. Team England is a major part of it but it’s not the only part.”
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Graves, 57, grew up on a farm in South Yorkshire which had its own cricket pitch; so he “started playing when I was four or five”. He played league cricket for 40 years, mostly for Dunnington, and it is his experiences there that are informing his back-to-basics strategy. “We had a railway carriage in the corner of the field that leaked when it rained,” he says. “Now the facilities are fantastic, not just for cricket but for the whole community. And that’s what I want to get back to with cricket – I want cricket to be the centre of the community. It’s virtually reinventing cricket – that’s the way I see it.”He talks about ridding the amateur game of bureaucracy which will be music to many ears in cricket’s army of indispensable volunteers but also sounds a little like populist opportunism.”We can help them [clubs] with lots of things but in terms of ticking boxes … sorry I don’t want to know.” When I suggest that surely the bureaucracy of which he speaks is not simply a ruse to justify the existence of ECB administrators, Graves pulls a face that suggests a degree of suspicion, to say the least, about the way the game is run. “I don’t want the ECB to be seen as a bureaucratic centre that tries to dictate what happens at a recreational level. It’s all down to volunteers and we should make it easier, not harder, for them.”Graves has five years at the helm and he wants “to make a difference” in that time. This includes sorting out the schedule of the professional summer. He isn’t the first – and almost certainly won’t be the last – administrator to believe he can tame the overgrown maze that is the domestic fixture list.”Our English season is congested,” he says. “It’s stop-start in a lot of areas and doesn’t seem to be joined up. Lots of things don’t seem to be working – we had a 50-over final at Lord’s when we only sold 10,000 tickets. We’ve really lost our way with the schedule. I want to talk to all the stakeholders – we’re all in this together. It’s not just about keeping one sector happy at the expense of all the others.”All Out CricketThe various challenges for English cricket that Graves articulates are not radically different to anything the game has faced before but the implication in his words is that the solutions might be. He takes exception to the suggestion that the ‘blank sheet’ philosophy is a kneejerk reaction to the World Cup. “We were already doing it,” he says brusquely. “This process didn’t just start when we got knocked out of the World Cup. This started with Tom Harrison as the new chief executive.”Harrison, 43, who replaced the long-serving David Collier as chief executive in January, is part of the new broom of younger suits sweeping through the ECB that includes a new commercial director, Sanjay Patel, who joined last June, and Chris Haynes, who arrived in March from Sky Sports to replace Colin Gibson as head of communications. “I’m not criticising the old regime but we needed a new executive to take us forward with new ideas, new energy and more vigour,” says Graves. “They’re bringing different ideas and enthusiasm to this business which is what it needs. People are sitting round talking about things that have never been talked about.”For a game that is so widely perceived as conservative, English cricket always seems to be in a state of flux. The big question today is not whether things will change but how. Blank sheet of paper? Not for much longer.
