Colin Graves claims Yorkshire CCC is about to run out of cash but remains ready to help

Graves withdrew an offer to return to the club as chairman last week, claiming that the board had treated him as a “last resort”.

But the former England and Wales Cricket Board chairman said on Monday that he would still be prepared to come back rather than see Yorkshire “disappear”.

Yorkshire owe circa £15m to the Graves Family Trust, with a £500,000 payment due in October and the rest of the balance in October next year.

The club’s latest accounts warn that without further funding of around £3.5m – roughly the same amount that they have spent on the racism crisis in the past two years – Yorkshire “will not be able to continue as a going concern”.

Yorkshire say “at no point” did Graves make “a clearly defined, tangible offer that the board was able to consider formally, unlike other interested parties involved in the refinance process”, with the club having been publicly linked with potential investors including Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group, the owners of Delhi Capitals (the Indian Premier League franchise) and, in a very Yorkshire CCC-esque twist, a Saudi Arabian prince.

“We are continuing many positive conversations around investment from various sources,” said a club statement, adding that “the club is not for sale and we have turned down several offers to buy the club outright”.

In an interview with Sky Sports News, in which he also denied that the club where he was chairman from 2005 to 2015 was institutionally racist, or indeed had problems with racism, Graves said of the financial predicament: “As far as I know, Yorkshire are going to run out of liquid cash in September-time.

“So, from that proposal (starting point), they are putting around that they are wanting £5m cash injection on top of the £15m owed to the Trust, so they are looking for £20m.

“If a buyer or investor doesn’t come in, presumably the only way forward for them is to go into administration, and when that happens – and I hope it doesn’t happen; that’d be the worst thing that could happen – then the administrator will have to talk to the trustees of the Trust because the Trust has got first legal charge over the ground.”

Graves had offered, if elected chair, the agreement of trustees to extend loan repayments by a further three years, providing time to refinance and restructure the Headingley club.

He also pledged the backing of new outside investors but demanded “total control to run the board, the executive and the club for the benefit of the Yorkshire members”, a stipulation to which the board baulked, saying it ran counter to fairness, transparency and best governance practice.

Graves suggested many of the problems had been caused by Lord Kamlesh Patel, the previous chairman, with the club having spent millions on unfair dismissal pay-outs, legal fees and costs.

Parachuted in at the height of the crisis, Patel said his actions were motivated by the need to preserve international cricket, regain the trust of sponsors and the confidence of the wider public.

“I think some bad decisions have been made,” said Graves of Patel’s tenure. “I think those decisions have now created where Yorkshire is today, with £3.5m loss on last year’s P&L, a shortage of cash going forward.

“You look (also) at the standard of cricket now that we’ve got in there. We’re struggling. Players have left. Sponsors have left. I think bad decisions were made, but it’s history.”

Graves said the next two months are “paramount” and that he remains ready to ride to the rescue.

Bridges appeared not so much to have been burned last week as atom-bombed when Graves accused the board of having “acted negligently to the impending financial crisis that the club is facing”, of spending money that the club “doesn’t have”, and of failing to implement a full cost review that he suggested in January to “stop the haemorrhaging of cash”, with Yorkshire responding strongly.

“I still would do the job,” said Graves, “provided they came back to me and said, ‘Colin, we ain’t going to sell the club, we want it to stay as a members’ club. We’ll come back to your idea and we want you to help us solve this problem. I would do that, but I’m not going to do it just dragging it out on and on and on.

“I’m doing this as a gesture for Yorkshire County Cricket Club, not for me, not for Colin Graves. I’m doing this for the Yorkshire members, for the Yorkshire players, for the Yorkshire supporters, and for the good of the whole of cricket.

“If they don’t go down that road, I just hope they get the right investors, or the right purchasers, to put the money into Yorkshire to make sure it is sustainable, it is a profitable organisation going forward and it retains its place in cricket history. That’s all I can hope going forward because I don’t want to see Yorkshire County Cricket Club disappear.”

As for the “total control” demand, Graves said: “There’s no point having a chairman who’s got his hands tied behind his back. “Anybody who goes in there, whether you buy the club or you go in as an investor, you are going to want some kind of control of who runs the club, who’s there as the executive.”