What Richard Thompson can do for English cricket

Well alleluia, English cricket doesn’t seem able to put a foot wrong these days. After hitting three cherries with Rob Key, Brendon McCullum and Ben ‘Bazball’ Stokes, they may well have struck the jackpot with the appointment of Richard Thompson, the Surrey chairman, to take over as head of the English Cricket Board, something this column has long advocated.

Thompson has plenty going for him: uniquely perhaps among the game’s administrators he is both traditional and forward thinking. Traditional enough to have realised the Texan conman ‘Sir’ Allen Stanford, with his million-quid pile of money on the Lord’s outfield, was a wrong-un. And forward thinking enough to have championed the women’s game, as well as diversity, with Ebony Rainford Brent’s African–Caribbean engagement programme, more quickly than you can say ‘Yorkshire we have a problem’.

He revolutionised Surrey during his time at the Oval, turning it into one of the most powerful county set-ups in the country and increasing its profits.