Colin Graves’s reign at the ECB divides opinion – as does the suggestion that the game helps maintain the political status quo

I am afraid that Matthew Engel is very wide of the mark in his criticism of Colin Graves, the visionary chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board (Time for cricket’s true believers to unite against ECB’s soft coup, Sport, 9 August). Graves and his team are, very belatedly, trying to play “catch up” after 15 years of stalling by the sclerotic county-led governance of English cricket.

When Twenty20 cricket was first played in England in 2003 the huge potential for tapping into a youthful new market for the game was clear for all to see. What was needed was a city-based franchised competition including the very best players from all over the world – as the Indian cricket authorities created in the IPL 10 long years ago.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Colin Graves, the controversial ECB chair. Photograph: Matthew Impey/Rex/Shutterstock

The hopeless need to feed a bloated county structure of 18 first-class counties employing more than 400 professionals (Australia has six, with fewer than 100 professionals) has delayed England making the most of the T20 bonanza.

Graves and the new ECB directors should be heartily congratulated for pushing the county dinosaurs aside and bringing sharp commercial thinking back into the English game.

David Willis

Cricket Reform Group

• I couldn’t agree more with Matthew Engel. The counties are “owned” by their members, and without us there would be no first-class cricket in the UK. Get the marketing men out of our game and let the cricketers get on with it.

Chris Grant

Harold Wood, Essex

• Stuart Jeffries (Football is back to oppress us, as Karl Marx might have said, Journal, 9 August) might have a point that football is diverting the revolutionary energy of the masses, although I suspect that Arsenal fan Jeremy Corbyn would say it is encouraging discontent with the system. Jeffries goes too far, though, in suggesting that cricket helps maintain the status quo. Anyone who has seen the film Fire in Babylon about the West Indies cricket teams of the 1970s and 80s will know the game promotes anti-imperialism.

Keith Flett

London

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