The great thing about the online revolution is that it is a lot easier to bury bad news than it used to be. In the good old days, one of the first signs of spring was the reassuring thud on the doormat of the ECB's annual report and statement of accounts. Nowadays, the ECB just sticks the document up on its website and leaves anyone who might be interested to go and find it.

Maybe I am being a tad cynical, but I reckon they weren't all that keen for outsiders to read the 2009 edition. After all, 2008 was not a great year for English cricket: a first home Test series loss in five years, the departure of Michael Vaughan and Paul Collingwood as captains, the bitter seeds sowed for the removal of Kevin Pietersen and Peter Moores as captain and coach, and the disastrous dealings with Allen Stanford.

Ah yes, the Stanford affair. That should make good reading. I wonder how Giles Clarke, the chairman, and David Collier, the chief executive, are going to explain the multi-faceted embarrassments of allowing Stanford to use Lord's as a heliport, the sale for a week of the England team in Antigua and the doomed plans for a quadrangular tournament at Lord's this weekend? Now, where is that report?

Well, all these things might have made for good reading. But then came the search for Stanford's name in the report ... and the discovery that, ever so mysteriously, Stanford's name seems - rather like the man himself back in February when the US financial authorities were eager to speak to him - to have gone missing from all 52 pages of the document.

It is not as though the crisis that engulfed Stanford came too late for inclusion. Adorning the report's front cover is a photograph of Charlotte Edwards holding aloft the women's World Cup, a trophy that was won in late March, several weeks after Stanford hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons.

No, the Stanford fiasco could have been included but wasn't. Instead, Clarke's three-page chairman's statement concentrates on such issues as a lucrative new media deal, a rise in attendances at county matches and the success of the England women's team, but there is no reference to the 100 hours of talks with Stanford that presaged various deals worth eye-watering amounts of money (if only it had materialised) or the defeat to Stanford's Superstars on November 1 which meant each England player missed out on $1m.

Clarke merely states: "It was an extremely difficult end to the year as the England tour to India was disrupted by the terrorist atrocities in Mumbai ... a quiet year - I don't think so."

Nor did Collier in his statement make reference to the Stanford deals he brokered. Indeed, Collier did very little looking back on 2008 at all, preferring to focus on the future, although he did remind readers that among the targets in the ECB's Building Partnerships programme were "effective leadership and governance" and "successful England teams". Whether the ECB's leadership has really been effective of late, or the men's team can be described as successful, is open to debate.

Clarke last week told reporters he was unrepentant about English cricket's dealings with Stanford, saying that he felt the England team had performed a service to grassroots cricket by playing the Stanford match. Even though England lost, the ECB received $3.5m, which has been distributed to counties. Hard to find reference to the $3.5m in the accounts though.

Elsewhere in the report, Hugh Morris, the managing director, wrote an effusive tribute to Moores, praising his "dignity, honesty and loyalty", but had no such consolatory words for Kevin Pietersen, who departed as captain at the same time.

The failures of the England team were reflected in the fall of the wage bill on England cricketers from £4,468,000 to £4,138,000.

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