Giles Clarke has had a rough week, notwithstanding his unopposed re-election as chairman of the ECB. When the news broke of Allen Stanford's alleged fraud during the third Test match in Antigua, Clarke's normally breezy confidence - others call it preening arrogance - was visibly shaken. But there has been little sign of contrition since; he has not “for one moment” considered resignation and refers to the ECB's relationship with Stanford as “historical”.

Does he accept, though, that English cricket has become a laughing stock after the Stanford fallout and the handling of the Peter Moores-Kevin Pietersen affair and does he understand why followers of English cricket are angry? “It is true that I have received a lot of criticism in the media, some of it hysterical and utterly irrational, some of it ad hominem and immensely rude,” he said. “I discard those people. As for the Pietersen-Moores issue, it needed to be sorted out and I have told the cricket side of the organisation that if they wish Kevin Pietersen to captain England again in the future, I will not stand in his way.

“I am prepared to listen to serious arguments about what is right for the game moving forward, but I am not prepared to listen to two county chairmen [Neil Davidson, of Leicestershire, and Rod Bransgrove, of Hampshire] who voted for Lord Marland in an election that went 14-2 in my favour. We have a democratic process and they must accept the result and the judgment of their peers. I don't know what people would have said at the time had we not done the deal and had we not allowed our players the chance to play for $20 million [about £13.84 million]. There has been a lot of sagacious hindsight.”

But what about Stanford and the humiliation of making one of the biggest deals in the history of English cricket with a man accused of fraud on a shocking scale? “We have to go back to 2007, when the ICC encouraged member boards to enter agreements to help West Indies cricket,” he said. “Like many, we were concerned about developments here and we tried to help by investing a lot of money in coaching programmes. We entered into the agreement with Stanford in good faith and we believed we were helping West Indies, who were, after all, a contractual party to this. The ICC also sanctioned the games and provided umpires. We upheld our part of the agreement, we were paid in full and we will use that money to benefit in England and Wales.”

Surely, it must have been galling for Clarke, a successful entrepreneur, to have been taken in by an alleged fraudster? “A very large number of people in other organisations were involved with Stanford over a wide geographical area,” he said. “The Securities and Exchange Commission, one of the largest regulatory bodies, with massive resources at their disposal, whose job it is to protect the investor, had not indicated that anything was untoward. This is a job for the financial regulators and they have played a very questionable role in the financial crisis. And I have to say, we were the first governing body to sever our links with Stanford. Vijay Singh [the Fijian golfer] was still wearing the Stanford logo in a tournament at the weekend.”

But what about the principle of the matter? Was it not wrong that the national team were put out to tender to the highest bidder, like a piece of meat at a cattle auction? “There are two separate issues here,” Clarke said. “We have been approached by a very large number of organisations and individuals to play in a number of games in England and elsewhere for much more money than Stanford offered. But this particular individual was already involved with cricket through a tournament in the Caribbean that had been widely praised.

“We are going to have to look at how we make decisions about who we associate ourselves and the England team with. I appreciate that there is a definite issue to be debated about the proposals for our national team. We need to be considerably clearer about what we allow the national team to play outside of their international obligations. That, in fact, was the major issue to come out of our review at the end of the Stanford week.”

Entrepreneurs are risk-takers and inevitably some risks will come off and some will go up in smoke, but should not the running of a national sport be different from running a plc or a private equity company? Isn't the England team too precious a commodity to be treated as just another deal to be made? “It is a different animal but we did nothing improper or illegal and what we did, we did because we believed it was in the best interests of raising funds for the game,” he said.

Does Clarke believe that after two years running the game, English cricket is in better shape? “But for the strong action taken at a very difficult ICC meeting, we would be welcoming Zimbabwe in April,” he said. “That is a huge achievement. We have a lot more people playing the game and a lot more clubs with decent facilities. When I came in, we didn't have any financial reserves at all, but now we are in good financial health, which allows us to spend 21 per cent of our income on grassroots cricket.”

And how is the ECB's relationship with the players and, specifically, the Professional Cricketers' Association (PCA), given the rumours over the weekend that the bodies were on the point of legal action? “I have a high regard for Sean Morris [the chief executive of the PCA] and I am grateful for the role he played in the wake of the Mumbai bombings,” Clarke said. “But like I hope to do the job without interference from my predecessor [Lord MacLaurin of Knebworth], I would like Sean to have the opportunity to do the job without interference from his.” With a final swipe at Richard Bevan, Clarke moves on.