News broke today that the ECB are planning on cutting 62 jobs in the wake of the Covid shutdown. This is far from surprising, the scale of revenue loss for all sports forced to play behind closed doors has been catastrophic, and in cricket’s case exacerbated by coming into force just as the season was about to get under way. Televised Test matches and ODIs will have mitigated some of the financial distress, but as with businesses up and down the country and across the world, revenue falls equates to needing to cut costs, and staffing is invariably one of those to be impacted.

Yet the ECB statement raises as many questions as it answers, both in terms of where the reductions will come and how the cost cutting will take place. There is the confirmation that their plans including the Hundred will continue to go ahead by stating that they intend to deliver on their Inspiring Generations strategy, which is no surprise at all, but is finally in black and white. Secondly, they detail that their staffing budget will reduce by 20% at the same time as talking about the 62 positions. According to Statista the ECB employ 379 staff, making the 62 to go around 16% of the total. Yet it seems unlikely that the number of contracted players or umpires will be reduced, or not by any meaningful level, and thus the 62 is more likely to come from development, coaching, administration, support and commercial.

That would also fit precisely, exactly, perfectly with the 20% reduction in budget, which may or may not be a coincidence. It is to be hoped very much that it is a coincidence, because otherwise it would imply no wage cuts at all for those at the top of the organisation. It is certainly true that they took reductions in salary during lockdown, but according to George Dobell this is currently only the case until October. There are some issues to be raised if that is true, particularly highlighted in the ECB release which states “We have now shared with colleagues our Board-approved proposals, which will generate significant savings”. What the ECB will do in future is an open question, but if Dobell is correct in his reporting, it is to state that during these Board meetings to approve the positional cuts, the level of executive pay cannot have been discussed as an agenda item, except at most to confirm the current level of remuneration.

This is highly surprising, particularly given Harrison’s warning that 2021 could well be every bit as bad financially as 2020, indicating the potential for a further £100m loss. To not factor in executive pay beyond October is simply extraordinary, and very hard to comprehend were it to be an oversight in the press release.

It remains entirely possible this is not the case, and that the reporting is incorrect. But at the very least questions need to be asked about this, for from a cursory reading both of the press statement and the Cricinfo article, it appears that as things stand executive pay, including Tom Harrison on his £720,000 a year may well be being reinstated. During the lockdown period all ECB staff took pay cuts of between 10 and 25%, a further implication with this 20% reduction in headcount AND a 20% reduction in budget that pay for the others is returning to normal. Again, there’s the possibility that the budget cuts are on top of those already undertaken in salaries, but it would be extremely unusual not to mention that if it were the case.

Finally, if redundancy payments are included in this new budget, then that would be a different consideration, but if they are separated out elsewhere in the accounts, as severance payments very often are, then those staff under threat would have grounds for asking some fairly major questions. It is to be hoped that the journalists do just that.