Hampshire paid £1m by ECB after missing out in 2023
County challenged decision to give Headingley match
The lack of Ashes cricket in the north of England next summer is the result of a legal dispute that followed the allocation of venues for the 2023 series against Australia, which also involved the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) paying about £1m in damages to Hampshire.
The Guardian can reveal that Hampshire brought a legal challenge against the ECB after missing out on hosting the Ashes in 2023 to Yorkshire, who staged the third Test – which England won by three wickets – at Headingley.
Hampshire are understood to have challenged the 2023 allocation on the grounds the club said they were promised their first Ashes Test at the Rose Bowl that year at a meeting of the 18 first-class counties in 2018, alongside matches at Old Trafford, Edgbaston, Lord’s and the Oval, with Headingley to be given a Test in 2027 instead.
The Guardian has been told the ECB’s original plan had been to award Old Trafford and Headingley one Ashes Test apiece in 2023 and 2027 respectively, but that decision was changed after a report from a four-person independent panel. It recommended the Test that had been pencilled in for Hampshire should take place at Headingley.
The ECB was at that time chaired by Colin Graves, a former Yorkshire chair who subsequently returned to Headingley in 2024 to address the club’s financial problems. An ECB press release issued in February 2018 announcing the 2023 venues said Graves had recused himself when the independent panel made its recommendations to the ECB board, which made the final decision.
Graves told the Guardian this week that he was never involved in the award of international matches while at the ECB. “Test matches were awarded by a ‘balanced scorecard’ points system assessed by an independent host venue panel,” Graves said. “I always left the room when their recommendations were discussed by the board. I was not involved.”
Hampshire subsequently launched a legal challenge, however, which resulted in an out-of-court settlement with the ECB. The ECB’s payment to Hampshire is understood to have been approved by the board some years later to end the legal dispute. The matter was resolved after Graves stood down as chair in 2020.
Graves was previously executive chair of Yorkshire between 2012 and 2015, when he joined the ECB for a five-year term as chair, before returning to Headingley as chair in 2024.
Yorkshire did not stage an Ashes Test during Graves’ first spell as chair, as during that period the ECB ran a competitive bidding process for big-match awards and the cost was deemed to be prohibitive. Yorkshire declined to bid for Ashes Tests for the 2013 and 2015 series due to financial difficulties.
The club had debts of about £22m to Graves, which he transferred to a family trust of which he was not a trustee, when he left Headingley for the ECB in 2015, and subsequently borrowed a further £20m to develop the ground.
In addition to the 2023 Ashes Test, Headingley was awarded two other Test matches in the ECB’s 2018 allocation covering 2020 to 2024, which helped ease its financial problems.
The ECB has been widely criticised for its venue selection for next summer’s Ashes, with Trent Bridge the only ground north of Edgbaston in Birmingham; the other three Tests take place at Lord’s, the Oval and Hampshire’s Rose Bowl.
England’s captain, Joe Root, said it was a “shame” that Headingley had been excluded from the Ashes after his side completed their seventh successive Test victory in Leeds against Pakistan last month, with his predecessor Ben Stokes going further by describing the omission as “scandalous”.
Hampshire’s relationship with the ECB has improved considerably in recent years, with the county coming to the governing body’s aid by staging three Tests and three T20 internationals behind closed doors at the Rose Bowl during the Covid-ruined summer of 2020.
Their former owner and chair Rod Bransgrove spent tens of millions on building and improving Hampshire’s ground, now known as the Utilita Bowl, after saving them from bankruptcy in 2000, before selling the club to the Indian media conglomerate GNR Group two years ago.
Hampshire have regularly staged international cricket at the venue since 2003, including Test matches against India and Sri Lanka in addition to the biosecure Tests in 2020, but next year will be their first Ashes Test.
The ECB and Hampshire declined to comment.
