I am a member of Warwickshire County Cricket Club.  I recently received my notification of the club's Annual General Meeting.  This included notice of a Special Resolution to revise the club's governance.   What is proposed is that the Committee - a body of members which (in theory) runs the club is replaced by a Board.  The Board will have an equal number of members and non  - members (5 members, two executives and three appointed non  - executives).  The ostensible purpose of the proposed reform is to bring the club into line with the Sport England governance code.  But this is difficult to believe as Warwickshire is not in receipt of public funding and is not subject to the code. It seems more likely that the intention is to prevent the club's membership from being able to constrain the Chief Executive.  Another proposal in the Special Resolution is that applicants for the board will have to be approved by a nomination commit...

Martin Moxon, Yorkshire's director of cricket, has proposed that the County Championship be changed from the current two divisions to a conference system .  There would be three six team mixed ability conferences at the start of the season, with each county playing 10 games.  Then the counties would be streamed by results into three new divisions and five more games played.  But all 15 games would count towards the final rankings.  Cricinfo  have done a story on the proposal which includes an interesting statement, " Andrew Strauss, the director of England cricket, is known to favour a fall to as low as 10 ( first class ) games."  But  also reports that six of the smaller counties led by Sussex's Rob Andrew support the Moxon proposal for a 15 game first class season. At first glance it is hard to see much merit in Moxon's plan.  One good point is the suggestion of increased prize money going down to 15 place, but you don't need the convolute...

Going through the financial statements of  17 of the 18 first class counties  I wondered if it would be possible to get a clearer view of how money came to the counties and how it was  spent.  As a toe in the water I have had a look at Gloucester and Yorkshire.  These counties were selected pretty much at random but also because their accounts are old style reports to the members which provide a lot of information.  Many counties (especially the larger ones) just issue a glossy document which discloses the minimum required by law. Although first class counties are small in business terms they are highly complex organisations performing a number of different, but frequently overlapping, roles. To try and get a handle on Yorkshire and Gloucester I split their income and expenditure into three pots.  Firstly an ECB pot, this includes the grant from the ECB less the expenses of running a cricket operation and maintaining a ground (including interest a...

I have gone through the most recent financial statements for the English first class counties,  made an estimate of the financial strength of each and given them a Bentley Forbes Consulting ( TM ) financial sustainability ranking.  The overall table looks like this. County      Profit Assets Ranking Position Essex   4   4   4   1 Surrey   1   7   4   1 Nottinghamshire   5   5   5   3 Somerset   2   8   5   3 Derbyshire   8   3   5   5 Leicestshire    6   6  6   6 Sussex  15   1  8   7 Middlesex  14   2  8   7 Kent     9   9  9   9 Worcestshire    3  15  9 10 Gloucestshire   7  12  9.5 11 Northamptonshire   11  13  12 12 Glamorgan   16  10  13 13 Durham     12  14...