Graves leads Yorkshire's revolution of realism

The Len Hutton Gate at Headingley was stormed by revolutionaries at the Yorkshire County Cricket Club last Monday. The ancien regime has been peremptorily dismissed, but this coup d'etat has nothing to do with cricket. Yorkshire, the holders of the County Championship, may be about to be relegated, but this is about power not sport. These revolutionaries wear a collar and tie.

HSBC, the club's bankers, provoked the upheaval when they declared that they would continue to meet the club's growing debts only if absolute power was transferred to a four-man management committee. The costs of a new members' stand, hospitality boxes and a cricket school have broken through the club's overdraft limit of £6m. The budgets are hopelessly awry. The traditional management by committees of well-meaning amateurs is totally discredited. The old guard retain their heads but their dignity is gone, probably for good.

Thanks to HSBC, the only power retained by the club's members – the proletariat in this scenario – is the power to destroy. They meet on 29 August to vote on whether to raise YCCC's overdraft limit to £10m. "If they refuse they have a problem," says Colin Graves, the new chief executive. The problem is that Yorkshire would be bankrupt.

Colin Graves is the 54-year-old boss of the Costcutter supermarket chain. He is Yorkshire through and through, which means that he sounds ebullient, is suspicious of criticism and is proud of his roots. But he knows who matters in a business. When he arrived at Headingley on Monday he asked the players to meet him: "It was the first time they'd met a chief executive face to face," he says. The good news was that their wages would be paid. The bad news is that there will be cutsat the end of the season. Graves is reluctant to confirm the rumour, but it says that no less than nine players will go.

Graves' qualifications would intrigue a head-hunter. He has been a director of Grimsby Town FC for a couple of years He played for Dunnington in the York Senior League for decades, and more recently put on 133 with Alec Stewart in a charity game. He has not seen much county cricket this summer but he has a no-nonsense explanation of what has gone wrong: "The batsmen haven't scored enough runs and the bowlers haven't taken enough wickets." But the principal reason for his appointment is that Graves knows about budgets, cutting costs and how to deal with bankers.

He is flanked on the management board by a lawyer, Robin Smith the club president who recruited him; an accountant, Brian Bouttell, and a cricketer. Geoff Cope, a spinner who played for Yorkshire and England in the Seventies without ever licking a problem with his action, is the new chairman in place of Keith Moss, who resigned reluctantly last week. Graves's first job was to take the organisation of next week's Test match by the scruff. The second day is a sell out and 75 per cent of Saturday is sold, but Thursday is "a disappointment" – with only 60 per cent sold.

Deals were being offered last week to get sales moving. Tonly Panaro, the marketing director, has gone already. His temporary replacement is an energetic manager from Costcutter. (Chris Hassell, the former chief executive who was due to retire in November, has been told to stay on. Graves will decide when he goes, but it will be sooner rather than later.) Test revenue is vital and another failure to sell well – the one-dayer against Sri Lanka was a disaster – will only deepen the budget crisis.

Optimistic income forecasts were have not been met and costs are out of control. Graves promises to attend to the budget after the Test. "The situation is serious but retrievable," he says. He talks about break-even in three to six months, but that will be possible only if Graves can find someone like Sport England to pay for cost over-runs on the new stand, in which the safety officer insisted on features that bust the budget.

Yorkshire's crisis is no less serious on the field, and may not be retrievable. Oddly, Graves seems less worried by this than the money. "Relegation will make very little difference to the finances," he says. But some players are to be made redundant. Unless he has a central contract next summer, Darren Gough might become the highest profile casualty of the crisis.

He won't be the only insecure Yorkshire cricketer. "We will have the players we can afford," says Graves. Yorkshire cannot afford all of them. It is hard to measure the consequences of mismanagement off the field on morale in the middle, but it must have had an impact on Yorkshire's dismal season.

Where does the revolution go? Underlying problems have to be tackled, like the relationship with the club's landlords, Leeds Cricket and Football Athletic Co. They own the catering and advertising rights at Headingley, so the club gets nothing from the legendary beer sales on the Western Terrace. Paul Caddick, who owns the business, is keen to sell these rights to the club. The old regime stubbornly refused to deal with him. Graves will. "I'm more hopeful that, with Graves, there will be more commercial realism in the relationship," says Caddick.

Realism would be a new feature in Yorkshire cricket. Remember the battles over Geoff Boycott, the controversy over the proposed move out of Heading-ley to Wakefield, and the Fraud Squad investigation into the club shop. They have turned Yorkshire's cricket politics into a mystery and an entertainment. Conspiracy theories are mushrooming in Leeds. One suggests that outgoing chairman Keith Moss, an old enemy of Smith, was allowed to take responsibility for the cost of the new stand to give him enough rope to hang himself and his committee. Another has it that an opposition will try to persuade the 29 August meeting to vote against the board's motion – an act of anarchy intended to let the club declare bankruptcy and start all over again.

But for the revolutionaries, the replacement of committees of amateurs by Graves and the management board is the best news for years. They hope that it will lead to the replacement of a committee system by a permanent board of executive managers. If the revolution succeeds new sponsors will pour money in and budgets will balance again. The point is that these revolutionaries do not represent the people. They understand profit and loss. They're businessmen.