Colin Graves will be his own man as big changes loom at Yorkshire CCC - Chris Waters

Back then, he said that the directors and executive had “no conceptual knowledge or passion regarding the 160-year history of YCCC”.

Some may already be tempted, given that assessment of their capabilities, to ‘get their coats’; as with Margaret Thatcher, the man in this case – very much his own man – is unlikely to be for the turning.

One or two board members might stay on initially for quorum purposes – to ensure that the proceedings of the earliest meetings are valid as Graves assembles his own team.

After that, it will surely be farewell to chief executive Stephen Vaughan, chairman Harry Chathli (less than three months into a role that Graves would take), vice-chair Trevor Strain and fellow directors Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, Kavita Singh, Lucy Amos, Nolan Hough, Yaseen Mohammed and Leslie Ferrar, along with member representatives John Jackson and Richard Levin.

Darren Gough, the managing director of cricket, makes up a 12-strong board and Graves, by all accounts, will look with forensic scrutiny at every aspect of the club in what will be a top-down review of the structure/organisation from boardroom to dressing room to multi-faith room.

According to those closest to him, Graves’s first priority will be to overhaul the board and to improve an operational structure battling crippling financial pressure.

That the board has had to go back to him – thus effectively signing its own death warrant – highlights better than any figures ever could the severity of that pressure, which is basically some £16m owed to his own family trust and around £5m to various creditors, with the ECB having had to advance funds to help the club through the winter.

It highlights, too, that Yorkshire were effectively flogging a dead horse in terms of a proposition that had no serious takers apart from Mike Ashley, the former Newcastle United owner, who is an expert at dealing with stricken assets.

Certainly few assets have been more stricken than Yorkshire since the racism scandal helped burn an estimated £6m hole in their finances since 2021, and the fact that every man and his XL bully has known for months that the club was up for grabs – only for a paucity of viable refinancing partners to emerge – is sorely suggestive of a badly damaged brand and/or bleakly unappealing financial picture.

In that respect, Yorkshire are extremely fortunate that Graves – a proud Yorkshireman with the county’s cricket coursing through his veins – is still there and ready to step in again, having saved the club in the early 2000s and despite having said that he felt ill-treated by the board last summer when withdrawing an initial rescue plan.

For the simple fact is that the appetite for what Yorkshire were selling was just not there, rendering criticism of Vaughan and the board’s efforts to strike an alternative deal over the past months unfair and ill-informed – not least by Lord John Mann last week, whose claim that the club refused to talk to three feasible alternatives is difficult, nay impossible to square with the aforesaid reality of the board’s predicament.

For if Yorkshire didn’t do a deal and they went into administration/insolvency, it would result in the worst of all worlds for board members – not just the loss of their own positions but also the likelihood of further sanctions for the club in the form of fines/points penalties.

Sources close to the board say they now want to do the right thing (will all go gentle into that good night?) – and that right thing, once the Ashley deal was not deemed sufficiently robust, is Graves.

For his part, Graves is understood to have the full support of the ECB, which is significant given that his critics will say that he previously presided over a culture at Yorkshire which some have alleged (although it has never actually been proven by any investigation) was institutionally racist.

Graves’s views on the racism scandal per se can effectively be condensed as follows – it was an exaggerated affair propagated by individuals he dislikes and distrusts.

That said, he is prudent enough to realise that he cannot – and indeed must not – abandon the general course on which the club has embarked in terms of striving to improve and promote inclusivity in all areas, even if the number of club-held religious events (some apparently with free bars) will surely be among those areas examined.

Although such events are fine in principle, and difficult though it must surely have been for the club to strike the right balance between not doing enough and over-compensating given what had gone on, Yorkshire are – first and foremost – a cricket club that does not appear to have two brass farthings to rub together, not some quasi-religious body.

Indeed, from the present board’s perspective, their red lines, if you will, are that a deal with Graves must tie in with the work that Yorkshire have done in such areas as EDI, recreational and pathway cricket.

And so what is known as a period of exclusivity now exists until January 5, the date by which Graves and the board must come to an agreement that would then be followed by a ratifying EGM, for which the club must serve 21 days’ notice.

It is most unusual for an exclusivity agreement to fail at this stage – not least because of the legal costs incurred, although this being the wacky world of Yorkshire cricket, it is perhaps best to ‘watch this space’ just in case an alien from the Planet Zog comes in with an 11th-hour offer.

But, finally, there is light at the end of a road so long and winding that not even Sir Paul McCartney could have envisaged its serpentine curves.

In a story full of the most incredible twists, Graves has his hands on a prize which, ironically, his fiercest critics have played a large part in shepherding towards his grasp.