In sporting parlance, Ian Watmore, who has stepped down as chairman of the ECB after little more than a year in the job,
He had lost the dressing room. He had lost the confidence of the board, the executive, the forum of first-class county chairmen and chief executives and, after the horror show surrounding the decision to cancel the Pakistan tour, the confidence of cricket followers around the country. He had to go, writes Michael Atherton in The Times..
The gathering of the first-class chairmen and chief executives at Lord’s last week during the Bob Willis Trophy final, when they failed to come to a decision on the structure of the County Championship for 2022, was the last straw.
The meeting was a shambles, badly run and acrimonious in spirit, described by an attendee to me as the worst he had witnessed in any walk of life. After that it was only a matter of time.
Moves had been afoot since then, although there was some thought that the board would not act until after the Ashes decision and arrangements for the tour had been finalised. As it was, Watmore was visited by two members of the board on Wednesday afternoon during which the decision was agreed. They were pushing against an open door, as Watmore himself had come to realise that the job was more challenging than he anticipated.
If the meeting of the first-class chairmen and chief executives was the last straw, then the cancellation of the Pakistan tour was the decision that brought everything to a head. It was a terrible decision: shamefully reneging on a commitment with no good reason, appallingly delivered to the chairman and chief executive of the Pakistan Cricket Board, and justified with a comical press release. It made English cricket look like a laughing stock.
Worse, it made English cricket look high-handed, arrogant, duplicitous and weak all at once. Pakistan, a proud cricketing nation that had saved the English game from potential financial catastrophe at the height of the pandemic, was not even given the courtesy of a straight answer. The worst kind of arrogance. It is hard to exaggerate the sense of hurt and anger in Pakistan over an engagement that carried far more significance than a mere two T20s.
Hiding behind excuses such as player wellbeing and welfare simply didn’t wash when there were no good grounds for cancellation and no attempts to even raise a team. After protestations from the British High Commissioner to Pakistan, from the players’ representatives and taking into account public statements from the ECB’s own executive team, they couldn’t even get their story straight.
Unable to justify the decision or how it was announced, Watmore went to ground for a week, before his communications team encouraged him to plant a weak apology in carefully selected national newspapers. It was an obfuscation really, rather than an apology, and made matters worse. Those advising him have some questions to answer, too: first, thinking they can put out any old fluff in a press release and get away with it, and then being unable to tackle a mess of their own making.
Watmore came to his position, as a paid non-executive chairman, with little hard experience in the game, other than as a longstanding and genuine cricket supporter. Zoom can hide a lot and for most of the early part of his tenure, meetings were conducted remotely because of Covid. The board did not meet in person from the outbreak of the pandemic until midway through this summer. These face-to-face meetings and those with the executive did not go especially well. So with the executive grumbling, the first-class chairmen and chief executives unhappy, and supporters displeased about the perception of English cricket after the Pakistan cancellation, he had few allies left.
Cut from a very different cloth to his combative predecessor, Colin Graves, Watmore had tried to please everyone, but had ended up pleasing no one. The decision on Pakistan was a case in point: the offer of two extra T20s was intended as a thank you for last summer before a full tour in 2022, and thus was paved with good intentions, but ended up a costly (reputationally, rather than financially) mess.
Watmore will step down immediately and his deputy Barry O’Brien will assume the role for an interim period, but not permanently. It is to be hoped the appointment of the next chairman will be done with more rigour. Little in Watmore’s recent career, as a civil servant, brief chief executive of the FA and non-executive director of the English Football League, suggested he was cut out for the rough and tumble of cricket politics.
Watmore’s going should occasion others on the board to question their role as well. Anyone with an ounce of cricketing sense, or an understanding of the world game, should have been able to see how disastrous the decision to cancel the Pakistan tour was going to be, but there is a real absence of cricketing knowledge and expertise among the non-executives. It always seemed likely to me that there would be some serious fallout from cancelling the Pakistan tour. Ultimately, Watmore had to be accountable for the mess. Article reproduced by kind permission of The Times.
He had lost the dressing room. He had lost the confidence of the board, the executive, the forum of first-class county chairmen and chief executives and, after the horror show surrounding the decision to cancel the Pakistan tour, the confidence of cricket followers around the country. He had to go, writes Michael Atherton in The Times..
The gathering of the first-class chairmen and chief executives at Lord’s last week during the Bob Willis Trophy final, when they failed to come to a decision on the structure of the County Championship for 2022, was the last straw.
The meeting was a shambles, badly run and acrimonious in spirit, described by an attendee to me as the worst he had witnessed in any walk of life. After that it was only a matter of time.
Moves had been afoot since then, although there was some thought that the board would not act until after the Ashes decision and arrangements for the tour had been finalised. As it was, Watmore was visited by two members of the board on Wednesday afternoon during which the decision was agreed. They were pushing against an open door, as Watmore himself had come to realise that the job was more challenging than he anticipated.
If the meeting of the first-class chairmen and chief executives was the last straw, then the cancellation of the Pakistan tour was the decision that brought everything to a head. It was a terrible decision: shamefully reneging on a commitment with no good reason, appallingly delivered to the chairman and chief executive of the Pakistan Cricket Board, and justified with a comical press release. It made English cricket look like a laughing stock.
Worse, it made English cricket look high-handed, arrogant, duplicitous and weak all at once. Pakistan, a proud cricketing nation that had saved the English game from potential financial catastrophe at the height of the pandemic, was not even given the courtesy of a straight answer. The worst kind of arrogance. It is hard to exaggerate the sense of hurt and anger in Pakistan over an engagement that carried far more significance than a mere two T20s.
Hiding behind excuses such as player wellbeing and welfare simply didn’t wash when there were no good grounds for cancellation and no attempts to even raise a team. After protestations from the British High Commissioner to Pakistan, from the players’ representatives and taking into account public statements from the ECB’s own executive team, they couldn’t even get their story straight.
Unable to justify the decision or how it was announced, Watmore went to ground for a week, before his communications team encouraged him to plant a weak apology in carefully selected national newspapers. It was an obfuscation really, rather than an apology, and made matters worse. Those advising him have some questions to answer, too: first, thinking they can put out any old fluff in a press release and get away with it, and then being unable to tackle a mess of their own making.
Watmore came to his position, as a paid non-executive chairman, with little hard experience in the game, other than as a longstanding and genuine cricket supporter. Zoom can hide a lot and for most of the early part of his tenure, meetings were conducted remotely because of Covid. The board did not meet in person from the outbreak of the pandemic until midway through this summer. These face-to-face meetings and those with the executive did not go especially well. So with the executive grumbling, the first-class chairmen and chief executives unhappy, and supporters displeased about the perception of English cricket after the Pakistan cancellation, he had few allies left.
Cut from a very different cloth to his combative predecessor, Colin Graves, Watmore had tried to please everyone, but had ended up pleasing no one. The decision on Pakistan was a case in point: the offer of two extra T20s was intended as a thank you for last summer before a full tour in 2022, and thus was paved with good intentions, but ended up a costly (reputationally, rather than financially) mess.
Watmore will step down immediately and his deputy Barry O’Brien will assume the role for an interim period, but not permanently. It is to be hoped the appointment of the next chairman will be done with more rigour. Little in Watmore’s recent career, as a civil servant, brief chief executive of the FA and non-executive director of the English Football League, suggested he was cut out for the rough and tumble of cricket politics.
Watmore’s going should occasion others on the board to question their role as well. Anyone with an ounce of cricketing sense, or an understanding of the world game, should have been able to see how disastrous the decision to cancel the Pakistan tour was going to be, but there is a real absence of cricketing knowledge and expertise among the non-executives. It always seemed likely to me that there would be some serious fallout from cancelling the Pakistan tour. Ultimately, Watmore had to be accountable for the mess. Article reproduced by kind permission of The Times.
