The day after the Downton Dismissal and the chaos of yesterday already seems somewhat distant. Few journalists seem to be drawing the dots, with the trail leading up the line to Clarke so obvious it almost appears in neon lights. Clarke was a major player in the appointment of his MD, and yet today he leaves the ECB not to enable him to prosper more fully in his ventures in Colombia and Paraguay, but, er, wait a minute…… he’s been made President!

We knew this stitch up ages ago, but there is something even more unpalatable about it now, the day after his cataclysmic decision to appoint Paul Downton had been shown to be the abject disaster that it was. People who make appointments like that don’t stay long. People don’t generally beg those sort of people to remain on the ledger. Instead they are shunted aside, sometimes with an added gong to keep their mouths shut, and then we can pick apart their legacy at will.

To me, retaining this buffoon as Chairman is a stain on our organisation in this country. You cannot truly clean house, have a fresh start, if you merely move the dead rat from the living room and shut him away in the attic. It’ll still stink. His ICC role is even more of an insult, as the incident at the Wisden dinner appears to show. This man does not seem to be able to hold back when he has been criticised, or even mildly questioned. This isn’t Clarke’s team. This isn’t even Clarke’s organisation. I think Dean Wilson probably summed it up best:

But along the way he has ruled the game as if it were one of his personal businesses and he is a ruthless businessman.

His success in that part of his life has largely come about by doing what he thinks is best. By calling the shots, making the decisions and swatting away anyone who gets in his way. It works in business and for a time it worked in cricket, but the England cricket team and the ECB does not belong to him, and he doesn’t always make the right call, just ask Allen Stanford.

When it comes to sport and to cricket, you can’t just tell people what they want and what they are supposed to like. You can’t tell them that because you like one person over another, they must feel the same way.

You can’t endorse an England captain because he comes from the right sort of family.

That sort of outlook is what makes our great game exclusive when it should be inclusive. It is what shuts people out and makes them angry, so when you next ask them to dip into their pockets and buy a ticket to your show, they will turn their backs and look elsewhere.

I was beginning to worry about Dean, but this hits a nail on the head more than many of his other colleagues have. Instead of making it about KP, which is a major point, yes, but only one, he captures the essence of why I despise Clarke. The arrogance which comes from some sort of superiority that only a weapons grade pig can pull off. Every interview, every appearance and every word I heard from this individual brought one word to mind. No, not that one. The word is “unpleasant”.

Now many may laugh that a blog (and blogger) described as unpleasant by more than one member of the media should get on his high horse. But just like Newman, if you meet me, I’m really, most of the time, pretty nice. I like people who like me, and want people to. Clarke’s one of those I don’t get. He seems to get off on being loathed. Why the ECB couldn’t tell him to shove off, because all words seemed to indicate he was going to lose an election, I won’t know. While they made that decision, there will always be a stain.

I’d also like to approach one other point this evening, and it is the sudden reduction in the role and scope of Paul Downton’s role over night. To this, I’ll pick up on Jonathan Agnew’s piece on the BBC:

Downton had a difficult time of it. He was briefed that his first job must be to get rid of Pietersen. He took responsibility for that, but it was not 100% his call – it was a broader decision.

So perhaps he was an easy person to target with regards to KP. He has taken a lot of flak for that. And likewise he was not directly hands-on with the England team.

You have to question how much responsibility he actually had on England team matters.

Downton is moved from the key man in matters of England international cricket, to a sock puppet who danced to his master’s tune. So it wasn’t his decision to sack KP, but someone else. That someone else is either Andy Flower or Giles Clarke (OK, it could have been David Collier, but he was so far off the radar, he was in deep space). Both pose crucial questions to the future of English cricket. If it was the former, it appears as though we threw a drowning man, one who had been in charge of a team that imploded on the spot, a life raft. KP’s description in his “nasty” book of a man adept at managing upstairs seems appropriate. I am not an anti-Flower blogger. At this time I’m converting a lot of my Ashes DVDs from 2010/11 and enjoy the way we dismantled that team. We were a really decent team. But he’d lost it. That was clear. If it was Clarke, then we were sold the mightiest of pups by our friends rushing out of the door that spring day when Moores was appointed, to crown Downton with aplomb. Both the people who pulled the puppet strings are still employed at the ECB. That’s not symbolic, that’s insulting.

He was an easy target, Jonathan, because he made himself the target. He hid. Pure and simple, after the announcement. Not a peep in a live setting for a couple of months. I knew, as much as I could, then we had a problem. We call it, in our game, red flags. This was so red, it had a Liverpool season ticket. Read the stuff on the other blog. You’ll see what I meant from those early posts. The hilarity when Downton actually spoke for the first time, on a Waitrose ad. The difficult winter and all that….

I don’t want to pick on Aggers, but I’ve seen this theme more and more today. Except for one glorious exception which had me rolling about with laughter.

FEBRUARY 2014

After the Ashes whitewash, Kevin Pietersen and head coach Andy Flower are sacked. After days of silence, the official line on Pietersen’s dismissal is that the ECB wanted to ‘create a culture’ in which captain Alastair Cook had ‘the full support of all players’.