A little more than a month after taking up the ECB’s new post of managing director of cricket partnerships, Mike Gatting spoke publicly for the first time yesterday about his job and his initial task.
There was a certain ironic symmetry in the fact that, almost 20 years after the Shakoor Rana affair, the ECB called a press conference at Lord’s for Gatting to talk about umpires. He revealed the board’s aim to bring the Association of Cricketing Umpires and Scorers (ACUS) under its wing.
One of Gatting’s strengths is that, unlike many other former distinguished Test players, he has strong links to most levels of the sport. Where the likes of Sir Ian Botham and David Gower have scarcely picked up a bat since their retirement, Gatting plays regularly and loves scoring runs, as many amateur bowlers discover to their cost.
His association with the Middlesex Premier League is longstanding and, in describing his brief as “anything and everything from grass roots up to the first-class game”, he is well qualified to master it.
“This whole issue with the umpires and scorers is an issue that needed attention,” he said. “We need more umpires at the recreational level and we are looking to try and help with their recruitment.
We want to make it interesting, more of a job that people will enjoy. We want them to be the best they can be, whether on the village green or higher up. We will help them to progress. ACUS have built a foundation, but we’d like to take it forward as we have the resources.”
These would include aids such as video technology to help keen club umpires with self-assessment of their decisions.
Some 6,000 of the 9,000 ACUS members are active. Ballot papers are being sent out to all of them, with the result of a vote due on December 12.
Paul Bedford, the successor to Frank Kemp as the ECB’s director of operations for recreational cricket, is hoping that the officials will vote in favour of a marriage with the ECB, ending a state of autonomy that does not exist in the vast majority of Test-playing nations.
“We want to be united, one union,” Gatting said. As a former England captain with considerable man-management skills, Gatting has as good a chance as anyone of knocking heads together in a union renowned for its testiness.
There will be many other areas for Gatting to address, although he professes to be learning on the job. “There’s a lot on the agenda, a lot for me to get my teeth into,” he said. “Whether it’s ‘Chance to shine’, age group and women’s cricket, talks with regional development officers and so on. I’m having meetings as and when — with the chairmen and chief execs of the 18 first-class counties for a start. There’s a lot of listening, learning and reading to be done, as well as inputting bits of information.”
The use of the word “partnerships” in Gatting’s job title may appear vague, but it is apt. He is well acquainted with two partners of ECB — MCC and npower — being a playing member of the former and a paid representative of the latter at Test matches in the past few years.
“My whole role is about partnerships,” he said before alluding to a once successful one that has achieved notoriety of late for the wrong reasons. “I’m disappointed in both Andrew Flintoff and Duncan Fletcher as each side had responsibilities.” That is an area in which Gatting can be expected not to fall short.
Toby Radford will be confirmed today as Middlesex’s first-team coach in succession to Richard Pybus, who left the job after only three months last summer. Radford, 36, is a former Middlesex and Sussex batsman who was running the second team and the academy before taking on Pybus’s duties under John Emburey, the director of cricket. Ed Smith has been reappointed captain.
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