Mike Gatting and Lord’s go together like bacon and eggs, but behind a desk with a bulging in-tray is not where you would have expected to see him before last October. In a shake-up after the Schofield report, the former Middlesex batsman was brought in as the ECB’s managing director of cricket partnerships.

“That goes through from grassroots to first-class cricket,” Gatting said. “It encompasses MCC, PCA [the Professional Cricketers’ Association], [Lord’s] Taverners and charities, National Playing Fields Association, Sport England, premier leagues, age-group cricket, up to the first-class game. My first job was going round to all the first-class counties and talking to them about everything from issues with their county boards to academies and Kolpaks.”

But he has been at the other end of the scale, too. “I was down at a place called Englefield Green not so long ago, next to Wentworth Golf Club,” he said. “A guy had written to us to say ‘this is outrageous, we’ve got this funfair and it keeps ripping up our outfield.’ It’s one of these nice things; you go down and have a chat with the local council and hopefully there will be a compromise. So you do get out and about a bit.”

This is Gatting’s first desk job and he arrives from a morning on an IT course. He retired from the first-class game in 1998, was Middlesex coach from 1999-2000 and president of the Lord’s Taverners charity for three years. He will doubtless be in demand again as he remains the last England captain to win the Ashes in Australia.

The reaction from the counties has been instructive. “I think he is going to be good, he’s been to see me and I was impressed. Watch what he does,” one chief executive said. Others feel he will provide an avenue to funding or airing grievances. “They all know if they’ve got a gripe, they can tell me; it will get discussed,” Gatting said. “I am the conduit to the board.”

What a turnaround. Gatting’s run-ins with England’s governing body are well documented. Six months after the Shakoor Rana affair on tour to Pakistan in 1987, Gatting was stripped of the England captaincy, with his alleged encounter with a barmaid the reason given. The result was that Gatting led England’s rebel tour to South Africa in 1989-90. “I have sometimes been critical of the ECB, but if you’re going to be critical and then you get offered the job to do something about it, why shouldn’t you?” he said. “I love cricket, it’s something I’ve always wanted to put something back into.

“They [the ECB] said ‘come for an interview’ and we went through all the things that people went through in the report. Academies are high on my list, we’ve got to revamp the academies. We spend a lot of money on them and they’re not quite there.”

This has been linked to a perceived cultural problem of laziness. “We’ve got to put back some of the things - discipline, desire and sacrifice,” Gatting said. “I always called some of the people I coached at Middlesex ‘just enough’ people.”

Changing that system will lead to some interesting conversations over the next year as Gatting sets about asserting himself. He is a heavyweight presence at the ECB and is obviously keen not to tread on some of the overlapping toes, in public at least. It sounds as if some interesting conversations have taken place.

“The word competitive comes in more and more,” he said of conversations with counties. “Having non-qualified players gets explained by, ‘Oh, we want to be competitive’, but look at Essex. They played a lot of youngsters and got two in the England team in the last year or so. They didn’t win very much, but the players came on leaps and bounds. I would like to see as many England players as possible. You have to be realistic, clubs want to be competitive. Durham have done so well in producing guys for England but they’ve got some guys who’ve done very well who aren’t England qualified. It’s a balance.”

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