Give me a rest from ECB

Aug 17 2008 by Neil Farrington, Sunday Sun

IF you’ve got an old barrel somewhere about the place, go take a look at it.

Chances are you’ll find the gentlemen of the England and Wales Cricket Board swimming like guppy fish therein . . . and me lurking with a shotgun roundabouts.

I’m painfully aware that it now appears to be this column’s default mechanism: when in doubt or at a loss, take a pop at the ECB.

But they will make it so bloody easy — and necessary.

In the last two months alone, they have created and compounded the Durham Twenty20 debacle, shamelessly boarded the anti-Robert Mugabe bandwagon almost three years late and all but ensured overkill with their future Twenty20 plans.

I repeat: this is an organisation which happily allowed England to tour a totalitarian Zimbabwe in 2005 and cancelled a match after its due start time over a paperwork problem they were aware of a week or more earlier.

So it should have come as no surprise that the ECB saw fit to stop Steve Harmison playing for Durham in the Championship game against Nottinghamshire last week.

But it did, in as much as it exposed a level of stupidity — or pettiness — rare even among anal jobsworths in any sport.

The ECB insisted Harmison, pictured left, should “rest” last Tuesday rather than turn out in potentially one of the most momentous matches in Durham’s history.

This, despite him not bowling a ball the day before as England’s batsmen secured a consolation Test win over South Africa.

More to the point, despite him not being due to pull on an England shirt again for four months.

Sure, Harmison is contracted to the ECB rather than Durham, meaning any domestic game that he plays is, in theory, a favour to his county.

But given that it was Durham, and Durham alone, who recently helped turn Harmison back into a player worthy of an ECB wage, it would have been a favour returned.

And a painless one at that, given that there were still 121 days before his next England assignment — the opening Test of the winter tour of India.

All of which was put into perspective when I watched cyclist Fabian Cancellara win the Olympic men’s individual time trial on Wednesday.

In the space of barely a month (34 days, to be exact), Cancellara had covered 2373 miles — first in the Tour de France, then in the Olympic road race on the opening afternoon in Beijing.

Yet still he raised himself for the challenge of a 29.4 mile sprint (some sprint . . .) for gold in the time trials.

Behind him, Spain’s Samuel Sanchez came in sixth, but having already won the Olympic road race and finished seventh in the Tour de France.

Consider these iron men, then think about Harmison being ordered to put his feet up after bowling 43 overs in three days at The Oval.

As decent a stint as that sounds, it required him to run only around 4.4 miles. Cause for a hot bath and a good night’s sleep, perhaps. But not a week off.

No doubt the ECB would argue mine is a moot point, given that Durham’s game was a wash-out.

They would be wrong. And not for the first, second or third time this summer. . .