E(W)CB
It’s great news that Sophia Gardens is to host an Ashes test match in 2009. It would seem that not everyone is as happy with the decision as I am though. The Hamsphire chairman Rod Bransgrove seems particularly aggrieved.
I am angry and deeply disappointed. Quite clearly the ‘W’ in the ECB is silent, but powerful.
Stephen Brenkley explains in the Independent.
For a while yesterday – long enough to be fingered by the political correctness police – it felt as though the annexation of English cricket by Wales was complete. It began with the name of the ruling body which inaugurated in 1997, the ECB for short perhaps, but the England and Wales Cricket Board for long.
There have followed in pretty short order: a Welsh chairman of the ECB, David Morgan; a coach who may be Zimbabwean but whose second home is in Wales and whose first job in the United Kingdom was as Glamorgan’s coach, Duncan Fletcher; a Welsh deputy chief executive of the ECB, Hugh Morris; and an assistant coach to England who played his entire professional career with Glamorgan, Matthew Maynard.
It seems as thought the final decision however came down to, as everything in professional sport does these days, money. Glamorgan have received financial support from the Welsh Assembly and Cardiff City Council that the other bids could not match.