Tom Harrison steps down as ECB chief executive

Tom Harrison, the CEO of the England and Wales Cricket Board, is poised to step down from the role with Clare Connor, the former England captain and current managing director of women’s cricket and president of the MCC, lined up as interim replacement as a whirlwind few months of change at the top of English cricket continue.

Already this year the England men’s team have removed or replaced their director of cricket, head coach, assistant coach and captain, while the ECB are yet to find a permanent replacement for their chairman, Ian Watmore, who stood down last October after just over a year in the post. Watmore’s interim replacement, Barry O’Brien, himself resigned last month because of ill health.

“When times are really difficult you need people to step into that challenge and I am here to do that. I have never been more determined to do that. I am not running away from the challenge,” Harrison said in February. “It has been exceptionally difficult but I am not running away because it needs leadership and some consistency in terms of how we build back to a place where the game can recover from an extremely difficult period both on and off the pitch.”

Harrison has been an often controversial figure since his appointment in 2014, most notably driving through the introduction of the Hundred, a new limited-overs competition that was played for the first time in 2021. Ostensibly because of that competition’s commercial success he and a group of senior executives are in line to share a £2.1m bonus pot, despite cutting 20% of the organisation’s workforce during the pandemic, while last November his performance in front of a digital, culture, media and sport select committee investigating the game’s response to Azeem Rafiq’s