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.
Clarke's mistake was not that he couldn't find out that Stanford was a fraud before SEC did. He is culpable for falling for the business model that Stanford proposed. If he really believed that Stanford could penetrate the American market and make $20m from a single T20 match, then he is a fool and deserves to go. If not, then he should have asked where the money was going to come from. Why is Stanford willing to invest that kind of money just to associate his name with an inconsequential match, when much bigger banks don't spend that kind of money on cricket sponsorship. If he had asked those questions, then maybe, he would have sensed that it was a shady deal and stayed away from it.
If someone comes and offers me a million dollar to develop just one login screen, I will wonder what is behind it. As an individual, I might just take the money and don't tell anyone, but as a reputed organization, I won't even touch that deal. Clarke jumped at such a deal and should pay for it.
Posted by: Jamie Dowling at February 19, 2009 9:47 AM
The only way we, the paying public, will know for sure where the responsibility lies is for the full details of who undertook the due diligence and what was discovered to be made public. Ultimately responsibility flows upwards and Clarke is supposed to be a successful businessman. So what went wrong and where did it go wrong? I've had experiences where "due diligence" has been nothing of the sort, where issues that should have been known about weren't. Rocket science isn't needed, just excellent, deep research. That doesn't look to have happened. Clarke's desire to keep the county structure is admirable but what else about him is similarly so? The ECB has done itself no favours with recent events and people are rightly asking for straight answers and people to take responsibility.
Posted by: Chris at February 19, 2009 10:02 AM
Why does England plough so much time and enthusiasm in fighting sporting battles in the boardroom and the media? If the same focus was applied on the sporting field (with unified support) England would be a powerhouse in cricket, football and rugby. As a foreign observer I watch in disbelief at the politics. People seem to support a self serving cause or view more than they do their national team. Clarke made a very poor decision, but he was not alone in making that decision. When England accepts that no administrator, no coach, no team will ever be perfect and focuses on developing and supporting the unparallel depth of players it has, English sport should enjoy a golden age.
Posted by: Gopi at February 19, 2009 10:41 AM
I feel that Clarke should go even if Stanford wasn't caught. Being in such a reputed position in a strong organization such as ECB he didn't have to fall for such silly offers at all. I am Indian but I feel sorry for the British folks on losing free-to-air Channel 4 broadcast of test cricket. Clarke should have thought for a second as to why a body like ECB should run behind an individual. At the best he could have allowed Stanford to become a sponspor of team's kit or something. Cheap money is always a dirty money and we don't have to tell that to a grown up man. Clarke should go for more than one reason.
Posted by: rohan at February 19, 2009 11:43 AM
I think this is an internal matter for the ECB.Yes Giles Clarke period as head of the ECB has not been successful but all factors must be considered when the board decides to review his position as the head of the ECB.
Posted by: RogerC at February 19, 2009 12:42 PM
Giles Clarke is an arrogant idiot. He deserves every bit of this shame.
Posted by: Jack at February 19, 2009 1:00 PM
Dont you people think it might be wiser to wait a bit before assuming things about Stanford? After all, these are merely allegations and we haven't heard his side yet. I dont think rushing to judgement is a clever thing to do.
Posted by: sreekumar at February 19, 2009 3:37 PM
ECB...what does that stand for once more I sometimes forget. The ECB are a bunch of stuffed shirts who could not stand the fact that something other than England was better and more sucessfull(I mean in terms of money) than English County Cricket. They were so irritated that the IPL stole their idea and made it so sucessfull that they went to bed with the first person who flashed them some money. Now that has come back to haunt them. England, both its cricket administrators and its policitians need to realise that the days of Rule Britania are over and behave accordingly. Then they might find that this Island is still great in many aspects..
Posted by: Eusebius at February 20, 2009 8:11 AM
A balanced piece, Mike. Really, the biggest cancer in English society is the media, really they should take a hard look at themselves and their own hypocrisy, thriving on the scandalous yet at the same time self-righteous.
The ECB don't come out of this smelling like roses, but this is likely to be forgotten fairly soon as are most storms in a soup bowl.
Posted by: Vikram at February 20, 2009 9:11 AM
Mike,
As always you have provided a very balanced view of this issue and pointed out the core of the problem. For all the hullaboo raised by the various other journalists and people in power, they have not done that! Suddenly everyone seems to be acting as a self appointed moral police when in fact the core of the problem is not that ECB failed to perform due dillegence (probably one of the minor issues), but that the ECB went into a tournament organized by a private businessman. Businessman come and go and they have no real responsibility to ensure the health of the game. They can promote their companies and products or even themselves (as seems to be the case with Stanford) using cricket, but they cannot be running the game! ECB being one of the oldest and one of the financially strongest cricket boards in the world, should have known better.
- Vikram
Posted by: Roger@1stSlip at February 20, 2009 10:04 AM
There were many factors in play that motivated Clarke and his ECB to go with Stanford and most of them were illfounded.
None least was Clarke's feeling that he had to 'make up' to the English players with an alternative "commercial" opportunity because he had not allowed them to attend the inaugral IPL.
Posted by: Oliver Chettle at February 23, 2009 3:52 PM
It is a travesty of the truth to claim that the people who do not like the 18 county structure are not true cricket fans. I loathe Twenty20, but I am sick to my back teeth with a system that fails to deliver a winning England test team - but keeps hundreds of mediocre cricketers and administrators in work year after year. The current system does not exist to generate good cricket, and it just does not work at developing talent. It is all about jobs for the boys.
Samir Chopra lives in Brooklyn and teaches Computer Science and Philosophy at the City University of New York; his academic interests include the philosophical foundations of artificial intelligence and the politics of technology. In his third undergraduate year, he captained Mathematics in the departmental cricket competition (and lost to Chemistry in the first round). Samir played C-grade cricket in Sydney and makes guest appearances for his old club when possible (and desirable). Samir runs the blog Eye on Cricket and the cricket page at The Faster Times.
Paul Ford is a co-founder of the New Zealand cricket supporters' cult, the Beige Brigade. He was once described by a current New Zealand cricketer as "looking spastic" even mucking about with an Excalibur and a tennis ball in the backyard. Paul bowls right-armed Nathan Astlesque "nudes", his batting would make Ewen Chatfield look elegant, and he is a committed fielder. He sometimes grows a beard to hide his double chin and inhabits a periphery of cricket that Cricinfo is proud to be glimpsing through this blog.
Stephen Gelb grew up in Cape Town, a short walk from the beautiful Newlands ground. Always a better student of the game than player, his passion for cricket survived eight years as a student in Canada, where he learned to love baseball too. He lives in Johannesburg doing economic research at The EDGE Institute and teaching at Wits University.
Mike Holmans, a database consultant by profession, has spent thirty summers (and a few winters) going to the cricket. Brought up in one and working in the other, his dearest wish is for a season to end with Yorkshire winning the county championship by beating runners-up Middlesex by one wicket with five minutes to go. If it’s also a summer when England win the Ashes, so much the better.
Born in Colombo, educated at Oxford and now living in Brisbane - Michael Jeh (Fox) is a cricket lover with a global perspective on the game. An Oxford Blue who played first-class cricket, he is a Playing Member of the MCC and still plays grade cricket. His views on cricket might best be described as those of a "modern traditionalist". Michael now works closely with elite athletes in his job as a manager at Griffith University in Queensland.
Saad Shafqat takes special pride that his cricket-watching life began during the three-month interval between Javed Miandad's debut Test in Lahore and Imran Khan's 12-wicket haul at Sydney. Although a practicing neurologist based in Karachi, cricket has never been far from his activities. He has co-authored Javed Miandad’s autobiography Cutting Edge and has been a contributor to Cricinfo since 2005. His regular column Reverse Swing appears fortnightly in Dawn, Pakistan’s leading English daily.
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