Durham have called for Yorkshire to be kicked out of the Twenty20 Cup as punishment for fielding an ineligible player in the competition. On Monday evening, the quarter-final between Durham Dynamos and Yorkshire Carnegie was called off ten minutes before it was due to start after the ECB discovered that Azeem Rafiq, a 17-year-old off spinner, was ineligible when he played in Yorkshire’s final North division game, against Nottinghamshire Outlaws, on June 27.

An ECB disciplinary panel will decide Yorkshire’s fate tomorrow, but David Harker, the Durham chief executive, believes that his side should be allowed to advance to the competition’s finals day at the Rose Bowl on July 26, from which the two finalists qualify for the Champions League tournament in October that is set to offer a £2.5 million prize fund.

“The only fair outcome now is that we go to the finals day and if that means Yorkshire being kicked out, then so be it,” Harker said. “There’s a lot of bad feeling out there. Any other solution which doesn’t have Durham automatically proceeding is going to further disadvantage us.”

The options for the panel, which will meet at Old Trafford under the chairmanship of Judge Edward Slinger, are to fine Yorkshire, to order a replay of their game against Nottinghamshire, which Yorkshire won by nine wickets, or to expel them from the competition. If the latter occurs, Nottinghamshire or Glamorgan Dragons could play Durham in the last eight, or Durham could be given a bye.

A clerical error has been cited by Yorkshire as the cause of the problem. The county were initially fined £500 by the ECB on Friday when it was discovered that Rafiq’s registration was incomplete. The player’s paperwork was then sent to Lord’s, leading to the discovery on Monday that he also did not have a British passport, despite moving to Barnsley from Pakistan in 2001. Although he had played for England from under-15 to under-17 levels, in first-team cricket he is technically an overseas player.

It emerged yesterday that the failure to register Rafiq had been caused by a temporary member of staff, working as maternity cover for the club’s cricket secretary. “It was an administrative oversight and we hold our hands up,” Stewart Regan, the Yorkshire chief executive, said. “We had a change of personnel at the club but the buck stops with me.”

The late call-up for Rafiq to play came only when Michael Vaughan was made unavailable for the game by the ECB and David Wainwright, the left-arm spinner, split the webbing on his hand. Rafiq bowled two overs on his debut for 18 runs and did not bat.

Yorkshire will argue that they were not attempting to seek any unfair advantage, citing a previous example of Maurice Chambers, the Essex fast bowler from Jamaica, who was granted special dispensation to play for the county while awaiting his citizenship.

But Durham, already inconvenienced by the farcical abandonment at the Riverside on Monday, believe that any rescheduled quarter-final will put them at a disadvantage because of their crowded fixture schedule. One date that has been suggested is July 21, the day after a NatWest Pro40 Division One match against Middlesex Crusaders at Uxbridge. “We’d be travelling back late on Sunday to play a game on Monday afternoon,” Harker said. “It’s not going to be easy to gear the players up for that game.”

Rafiq was yesterday withdrawn from Yorkshire’s second XI one-day game against Derbyshire at Sheffield - second-team cricket is governed by different qualification requirements - to shield him from further publicity. He is also likely to be omitted from tomorrow’s second XI game against Lancashire at Weetwood. The match at Sheffield yesterday was abandoned, but this time the cause was merely a weather-affected pitch.

- Anya Shrubsole, a 16-year-old all-rounder from Somerset, is the only newcomer in the England women’s squad to face West Indies, South Africa and India this summer. Lynsey Askew, of Kent, and Ebony Rainford-Brent, of Surrey, were recalled, but Stephanie Davies, Charlotte Russell and Rosalie Birch have been dropped. England play West Indies in one-day internationals on Friday and Saturday in Loughborough.