Rise and dramatic fall
what had happened. They had rules if a club went into liquidation but they had stepped in before that happened at Durham.
“I asked Gordon, ‘so what precedent has been set?’. He said ‘I don’t think there is a precedent. I think we’ll have a look at it on an individual basis from now on.’”
His response seems to suggests the ECB might be questioning wether their decision over Durham was the right one. Be that as it may, it was those in charge of Durham who got it in trouble, not the ECB.
“I think there were a variety of things that contributed, for a start, unfortunate timing,” said Stuart.
Just as Leach and chief executive David Harker were overseeing the club’s policy of, essentially, speculating to accumulate, came the bank crisis and credit crunch in 2007. Ironically, its shirt sponsors at the time were Northern Rock, whose name is inextricably linked with the crisis.
“Possibly, they overdid it a little bit in bringing in perhaps too many top players,” said Stuart.
“Maybe in hindsight they could have had one or two fewer and still have been able to have the same or similar amounts of success.”
And he detected the feeling of a club wanting to punch above its weight from the very beginning. When the club put together its bid for first-class status in the early 1990s, the TCCB – forerunner of the ECB – said they did not have to build their own ground and use others already in existence in the county, as they had previously.
Then, when they were on the site in Chester-le-street which was to become the Riverside, Stuart said the chair of the party overseeing the bid commented that it would make a decent county ground.
“They (the Durham contingent) told him they wanted it to stage international cricket. So they went bigger even then than they had to.”
Staging international matches does not come cheap. Before Durham, there was a cosy club of six grounds which staged Tests. After Durham, Southampton and Cardiff became new venues too.
In the book, Gordon Hollins at the ECB told him they used the increased competition as a way of encouraging these grounds to improve their facilities. Stuart added: “But this kind of spiralled out of control for Durham and it got to the stage where the last Test match ever up here – Sri Lanka in May 2016 – was one Durham did not want to host. “However, Tests aren’t decided on an individual basis but divided into packages of games, bundling unpopular ones with popular ones. “The Sri Lanka game proved a disaster. It transpired the game clashed with an England football match at Sunderland on the first day and it came a week after England had hammered Sri Lanka just down the road at Leeds. It was May, so the weather wasn’t great, and Durham had to pay £952,000 for the privilege.” The figure was reached after Durham sat down with ECB experts who told them if they charged £30 a ticket they could sell about 30,000 of them, still less than what they were paying to stage a game they didn’t want to host.
“That’s when the absurdity of it hit home,” said Stuart. “And it just really accelerated the problems they were already having.”
Embarrassingly, on the last day of the game, England captain Alastair Cook became the country’s leading Test match run scorer of all time – with only 2,000 spectators in the ground.
But what of the future for Durham? The mention of funeral in the title of the book has nothing to do with the club. On the day “things went to pot” for Durham and the consequences of its actions revealed, Stuart was attending the funeral of a family friend.
The club is alive, says Stuart, but approaching a critical period. Next year, to increase the number of Division One teams from eight to nine, three counties will be promoted from the current Division 2.
It is vital Durham are one of these three, said Stuart, if it is not to lose its top players. Or worse.
“There’s a quote from Geoff Cook (former Durham captain and director of cricket there until last year) at the end of the book in which he says he’s not even sure 18 counties is the right number, even though he played a massive part in there being 18 in the first place, which says a lot.” Five Trophies and a Funeral is on sale at Amazon, WH Smith and Waterstones, RRP £19.99. Also available on Kindle.