Rod Bransgrove, the maverick chairman of Hampshire, had more than one thing on his mind as his expensively gathered team was going down to defeat against Durham at Lord’s. He was looking ahead to tomorrow’s one-day international at the Rose Bowl, the handsome ground on which he aspires to stage Test cricket, while simultaneously awaiting an official reaction to his hard-hitting critique of the ECB’s distribution of Tests and one-day internationals.

He does not mince words in the document seen by The Times, calling the existing system “anticompetitive, unfair, discriminatory and opaque”.

Bransgrove’s proposals for a better system suggest that the allocation of an Ashes Test to Cardiff in 2009 before any development of the ground at Sophia Gardens was irresponsible, but he is even more critical of long-term arrangements with Surrey and Yorkshire, calling them “unfair to the rest of the ECB membership”.

He adds: “It is incongruous that Surrey should apparently make little or no contribution from its major matches to the ECB’s distributable sums while actually receiving its share of significant payments made by other major match hosts, in addition to the vast profits generated as a result of its long-term staging agreement.”

Matches are allocated by an independent group chaired by the former TGWU leader, Lord Morris of Handsworth, but Bransgrove claims that its policy of making decisions on the basis of what he calls a “bidding war” takes too little account of spectator amenities.

“Whilst claiming a policy of openness and transparency, the Board has kept the key terms of its staging agreements secret,” he said, adding that if the ECB were a plc all its shareholders [members] would have equal access to the information. He proposes instead an independent audit of all ECB income from major matches, open distribution of those funds and an overhaul of the system of allocating major matches to allow the host club to retain 80 per cent of the gross income to enable it to maintain modern facilities.

Bransgrove’s complaints hardly conceal his ambitions for Hampshire as the club plan further development based round a new hotel but they prove again that nothing creates greater tension and envy in domestic cricket than the potential earnings of different clubs through staging major matches. The four counties who reached the Twenty20 finals day a fortnight ago, for example, were angry that they received nothing other than prize-money for players whereas Warwickshire, the hosts, took the great majority of the profits as compensation for not getting a Test this year.

The onus is surely on Giles Clarke and Michael Soper, the rivals in the new election to be chairman of the ECB, to make clear to all the counties their policy on these and other crucial areas such as the volume of domestic and international cricket.

An ECB spokesman said yesterday that the sums involved in present staging contracts would remain secret. Existing agreements with MCC and Warwickshire last only until 2009. Lancashire and Nottinghamshire have contracts to 2011 but Yorkshire’s extends to 2015 and Surrey’s until 2019. Negotiations for future Tests at Lord’s start soon but the spokesman said that future agreements would be for no longer than three years.

Explore Cricket

• Counties